Essay About Author Nikolai Gogol And New Culture

Formation of a Sense of BelongingThere are many Influences which impact a person’s identity and contribute to the formation of a sense of belonging. Belonging is the fundamental nature of humans to connect with others. The novel ‘The Namesake’ by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003) explores the journey of a Bengali family who cope with dislocation to a new culture when they move to America. Gogol, born to first generation migrants, struggles with his identity throughout the novel. The Play ‘A Doll’s House’ by Henrik Ibsen (1879) explores the powerful influence of relationships on an individual. The film ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ directed by Bruce Breseford (2009) explores the influence of past experiences and cultural belonging on the establishment of the main character’s identity. The composers present the challenge to belong in context with past experiences, relationships and culture.

An individual’s past experiences with others and the world shapes their perspective on current and future events and ultimately dictates what impacts on an individual’ sense of belonging. In The Namesake, this is depicted through Gogol’s fractured identity as he tries to disassociate himself from both his family and his cultural heritage to forge his own self. Gogol, named after the author Nikolai Gogol by his father, wants to establish a new identity by changing his name to Nikhil. Lahiri uses the motif device to emphasise the connections between a name, culture and identity. The author notes that Gogol can more easily ‘tune out’ his parents’ ‘concerns and pleas’ by doing this, highlighting Gogol’s desire to establish a division in this key relationship. The irony of his new name, Nikhil, meaning ‘he who is entire, encompassing all’, highlights Gogol’s confusion of his identity and his resistance of his past experiences. Gogol separates himself into two separate people. “At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different.” This analogy used juxtaposes the two persona’s contained in Gogol. His new name allows him to be someone different and escape his cultural heritage and family. It allows him to belong to American society.

Similarly to The Namesake the protagonist in ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ presents a young boy living in a world of poverty juxtaposed with his new life living in America. Li Cunxin’s name means “Keep my innocent heart”, like Gogol, the ironic nature of his name emphasises his ability to connect to past experiences as well as his internal desire to be innocent. Past experiences of different countries and cultures are also explored through the protagonist, Cunxin, with the use of flashbacks and montages, returning the audience to earlier events to show their impact to his present state of belonging. The juxtaposition of scenes from his childhood home in China and his house in America highlight the dislocation of the protagonist and convey

‘Jill has long known that she is a child, and for her, as a child she is also a girl.

‘I wonder who, if any, of those children in our current system will ultimately end up at the bottom?

A large part of my desire, however, stems from the role of my characters in my story. These character arcs are based purely on dialogue from the show and are therefore often a direct mirror of the story. In this sense it is a lot easier for me to play off the characters in my story into what’s in the original manga and the series.

In the context of the current world, when an incident happens to a certain character and, while I don’t want to imply that it ever happened, I do feel that the characters are in a position to see through my own flaws and thus they do have other issues. The characters in my story often have other issues on the part of me. In my first few arcs I only got a glimpse of my character, my mother, but in my next (later stories) I had another glimpse of my parents and eventually my mother-in-law at the same time.

For this reason it was a bit of a struggle figuring out this is what goes through each story and trying to understand what makes up the characters. With that experience I can understand that certain issues emerge, but they cannot be explained away immediately. This gives me hope that this process will be beneficial to the anime, as they can allow us enough time to look more deeply into its internal contradictions and uncover its deep feelings about its existence.

This is why it’s so important to take a look at any individual individual’s story and develop them through it to see how it relates to other things. The question is whether it all comes from the same root, or the same core. And once you find the answer, you begin to grasp the depth of the series.

‘My first arc was a story about the struggles of a single family member. My son and I read the manga in our rooms and we saw the situation one after the other. But, for some reason, we both fell into a similar state.

Both of us were struggling to get a job, school, or even even enjoy any kind of freedom anymore. No one could even take us out into the world. This was where our thoughts often broke down (by the time we saw the end of my arc), and we struggled with the impact that that alone rendered us useless. At the beginning of the anime, I was still thinking about this and what we were dealing with, but I was too busy figuring out how to fix the problem (or if we are to do it justice, what exactly was happening here) to think about all of the other choices that the anime