LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:4 April 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

Celebrate India!
Unity in Diversity!!

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2020
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Identity Crisis, Ethical Selection and Ethical Consciousness in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Dr. YUAN Xuesheng

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Interpreter of Maladies describes the Indian American couple Mr. and Mrs. Das’ visit to the land of their ancestors. Mrs. Das confides in Mr. Kapasi, the car driver and interpreter of maladies, that her husband has not sired the youngest son and seeks for a cure of psychic pain. This paper analyzes its ethical features from the perspective of ethical literary criticism. Specifically, it sees the interpreting of maladies as the major ethical line of the work and tries to decode such ethical knots as ethical environment, ethical choice, ethical identity, and ethical consciousness. Jhumpa Lahiri proposes the ethical burden as a cure for people in modern society in need of malady interpretation.

Keywords: Jhumpa Lahiri; Interpreter of Maladies; identity crisis; ethical choice; ethical consciousness

Introduction

In 2000, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to South Asian Indian American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, who won the unanimous recognition of the judges for her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Before that, she also won many awards, such as Hemingway Award, New Yorker’s Best Debut of the year and so on. Michiko Kakutani of New York Times commented that Lahiri announces herself as a wonderfully distinctive new voice.... [She] chronicles her characters’ lives with both objectivity and compassion while charting the emotional temperature of their lives with tactile precision. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and poise...a precocious debut. The title story, The Interpreter of Maladies, also won the O. Henry prize and was selected as the best short story in America in 2000. The critic Sebastian Sdb said that “the story reveals how guilt ridden people like Mrs. Das seeks remedy for their ailments in the wrong place” (4). Mridul Bordoloi analyzes the protagonist’s migration dilemma from the perspective of cultural dislocation and home consciousness (28). Other scholars believe that “the interpreter of Maladies” is the author’s diagnosis and analysis of the life problems of Indian ethnic groups (Jin 203). Moussa Pourya Asl suggests that “What is notably absent in the scholarship is a study of the complexities of identity formation and the production of particular forms of subjectivities in Lahiri’s stories.” (3)

Lahiri tells the story of a Das couple (Raz and Mina), who were born in the United States and descended from Indian immigrants, returning to their parents’ hometown India to visit relatives with their three children. Lahiri’s writing reflects the writer’s concern for the Indian ethnic group in the United States and represents the voice of the Indian ethnic literature. “The rise of ethnic literature represents a demand for ethical reconstruction, which is essentially an ethical constitution” (He & Nie 9-10). During their visit to the Sun Temple, Mrs. Das told taxi driver Mr. Kapasi about her own adultery and the birth of an illegitimate child. She confessed her secret for eight years and tried to get a good treatment for mental illness from Kapasi, an interpreter of maladies. However, Kapasi, who can only interpret the physical pain, could not cure her inner pain, just as he and his wife could not get rid of the pain of losing their child. From the perspective of literary ethical criticism, along the ethical main line of "malady interpretation", this essay analyzes the ethical theme of the story by reproducing the wrong ethical choice in the ethical environment, depicting the ethical identity crisis and ethical confusion with the Sphinx factor conflict, and combing the return of ethical consciousness after ethical reflection.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. YUAN Xuesheng
Professor, Department of English, School of Foreign Studies
Jiangnan University (1800 Lihu Avenue, Wuxi, 214122
China)
yuanxsh2005@163.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.