Function of Multi-generation in One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Namesake | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Jhumpa Lahiri

Family sagas are key ways for communities to stake a claim of their history and culture. Multi-generational stories teach us that our lives are not simply our own but are also woven into the fabric of space, time, and family. In the following two multi-generational novels, the patriarchs, and the children they all face new challenges but come to realize that these challenges have, in varied forms, echoed through the decades. Here, I’m going to compare the two celebrated multi-generational novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. Since, both the novels are based on the theme of multi-generation, a comparable study can be made.

(Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Jhumpa Lahiri)

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magnum opus and is recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon. Renowned Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda called it:

"The greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes"

It is the multi-generational saga of the Buendia family in the isolated town of Macondo inaugurated the boom in Latin American literature in the 1970s and marked the beginning of magical realism. The patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founds the town of Macondo, and then we learn about his family for six more generations.

The Namesake is the first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. It deals with the themes of immigrant experience, identities and displacement, and ties and clashes between the generations. Like her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake focuses on first-generation Indian immigrants and the issues they and their children face in the United States.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a typical novel in that there is no single plot and no single timeline. It is Marquez's intention to show that history moves not only in cycles but also in circles. For this reason, there is no single main character in focus, nor does the novel follow a regular timeline. In his quest to show how history moves in circles, Marquez gives virtually every member of the Buendia family one of the following names: Jose Arcadio, Aureliano to men and Ursula, Amaranta, Remedios to  the women, which makes the novel  more complex and confusing.

On the other hand, The Namesake is mainly focused on the character of Gogol Ganguli and his father Ashoke Ganguli; and sticks to limited characters and that makes it less confusing. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. The novel centers on a Bengali couple, Ashoke and Ashima, who move to the U.S. in the 1960s, and their son, Gogol, who wrestles with his identity as the Indian American bearer of a Russian name and must come to terms with his place in the world.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is both the history of Macondo, a small town in an unnamed region of South America, and the town's founders, the Buendia family. The book follows seven generations of the Buendias and the rise and fall of Macondo and spans over hundred years. The family patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founded the town with his wife, Ursula Iguaran.

Contrarily, Lahiri's masterpiece The Namesake follows the Ganguli family over the course of thirty years in four generations and it moves between events in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City. Moving between these cities, the novel examines the nuances involved with being caught between two conflicting cultures with highly distinct religious, social, and ideological differences. We can see how the couple travel from Calcutta to Massachusetts and struggle to become Americans. It's complicated enough when it's just the two of them, but when they have a son, the generational clash heightens the burden of assimilation - for all three of them.

Jose Arcadio Buendia, Amaranta, Ursula, Aureliano, Jose Arcadio Segundo in One Hundred Years of Solitude - are left completely alone, even forgotten, for years at a time. Buendia men named Aureliano are said to have a "solitary" air. And the town itself is isolated and alienated from the outside world. At the very end of the book, the narrator concludes that the Buendias are a race condemned to solitude, and therefore they will not get a second chance. Similarly, in The Namesake, the theme of alienation, of being a stranger in a foreign land, is prominent throughout the novel. Ashima feels afraid about raising a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare. When she arrives home from the hospital, Ashima says to Ashoke in a moment of angst:

"I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back." (Lahiri 33)

Critics often classify Marquez's writing as "magic realism" because of his combination of the real and the fantastic. The novel carefully balances realistic elements of life, like poverty and house cleaning, with outrageous instances, like a levitating priest. The Namesake is basically a diasporic novel, which we can relate with the life of the author Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in the United Kingdom to Bengali parents and then moved to the United States as a small child and she is very much connected to India emotionally.

To wrap up, both the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Namesake are masterpiece and unique; and multi-generation is the only thread by which we can connect these two great literary works together. The function of multi-generation in a novel is significant. Through this we can learn about the history, cultures and clashes between the generations. Multi-generational stories teach us that our lives are not simply our own but are also woven into the fabric of space, time, and family. We have seen many similarities and dissimilarities between these two novels. We can notice that characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude keep committing the same mistakes generation after generation and they cannot get rid of it; while in The Namesake the characters struggle to survive in the United States.

Works Cited:

1. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. A Mariner Book Houghton Million Company, 2003. Print.

2.<https:// electricliterature.com/7- multi generational -novels-that-cross- countries-and-span-centuries> Accessed 17 June 2020

3.<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ One_ Hundred_ Years_ of_Solitude> Accessed 17 June 2020

18.06.2020

Cooch Behar,

West Bengal