“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (post 2): Narrator inadvertently implies “Gogol” and “Nikhil” are not just alternate names, but alternate personalities

Gogol Ganguli goes before a judge and has his first name, “Gogol” (a pet name accidentally put on his birth certificate and used for his first eighteen years) legally changed to “Nikhil” (the proper Indian name that his parents had intended) (1, pp. 100-102).

Yet, after the protagonist’s legal name-change and his use of “Nikhil” both socially and formally, the third-person narration continues to refer to him as “Gogol,” even in scenes with dialogue in which he is explicitly addressed as “Nikhil.” It violates common sense.

At first, I tried to rationalize it. Perhaps the narrator wanted to maintain the reader’s warm feeling toward the protagonist by continuing to use his pet name, which was still used by his parents within the family. But that rationalization cannot account for the following, in which the narrator reports how the protagonist tells a cousin about his new name:

“ ‘ I’m Nikhil now,’ Gogol says” (1, pp. 119); whereas, the common sense way for the narrator to have stated it would have been: “ ‘ I’m Nikhil now,’ he says.”

Phrasing it as being said by Gogol inadvertently implies that Nikhil and Gogol are not just two names for the same person, but two distinguishable identities and consciousnesses; that is, two alternate personalities.

1. Jhumpa Lahiri. The Namesake. New York, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003/2004.