Jasmine | Re-inventing ourselves a million times: narrative, desire, identity, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
In the following essay on Mukherjee's novel Jasmine, F. Timothy Ruppel suggests that Jasmine disrupts the traditional narrative process, thematizing narration and identity by illustrating, through the circumstances of Jasmine's character, how identity can be ascribed by outside influences that desire to define her character as known, or as conforming to, their own social, economic or hierarchicalized mythos.
We are the outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines, landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly, barely wakened customs guards await their bribes. We are dressed in shreds of national costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage. We only ask one thing: to be allowed to land; to pass through; to continue. (Mukherjee)
Who are these ‘‘strange pilgrims?’’ Certainly, we see them infrequently...
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