first sentence: "Plenty of people changed their names: actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites." He also employstense to reinforce his points in a subtle way. For instance, he uses past tense to underscore acts of free volition ("People changed"; "slaves renamed") while using the past tense in perfective aspect (had + -ed verb) for actions enforced upon others, as in "immigrants had their names changed at Ellis Island" (had changed is interrupted by the noun phrase their names).

Digression helps Lahiri elaborate upon both his story and his characters, such as for Gogol Ganuli when Lahiri digresses from the central story line to tell a separate brief, loosely related though significant story about the character's namesake, the Russian author Nikolai Gogol-Yanovsky, or just Gogol. In addition, Lahiri nestles important details  in blankets of preliminary minutia as when he writes:

Gogol Ganguli does the same. He rides the commuter line ... The area is somewhat familiar... televisions ... vacuum cleaners... Museum of Science ... But he had never been ... on his own, and in spite of the directions he's written on a sheet of paper he gets briefly lost on his way to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court.

Some literary devices Lahiri uses here relate to setting, character description, comparisons, and imagery, and he uses all in such as way as though to recreate an actual experience for the reader. His descriptions of setting and characters are both detailed and full of minutia. This, as a point of comparison, is the exact opposite of Jane Austen's descriptive approach! As an example of the minutia of setting, he writes that Gogol "rides the commuter rail to Boston, switching to the Green Line at North Station, getting out at Lechmere." As an example of the same for character description, he writes: "He wears a blue oxford shirt, khakis, [and]. ... Knotted around his neck ... yellow stripes on the diagonal."

Lahiri's use of metaphor and simile are sparse, while his use of imagery is prolific. These are each chosen to enhance his aim of recreating the feeling and experience of an actual event. The beginning of Chapter 5 has no metaphor and just one loose simile: Gogol "steps through a metal detector, as if he were at an airport." The comparison, through simile, to the an airport is meant to help focus in on Gogol's experience by using a more widely know experience. As for imagery, Lahiri is liberal with sensory imagery involving visual, as in the descriptions (e.g., "yellow stripes on the diagonal") and tactile ("soothed by the chill of the air-conditioner"), yet there is a profound absence of sound (auditory) imagery. The commuter train makes no sound; it is strangely silent; the security scan station in the marble Court House has no sound; there is an eerie absence of voices and objects being put down and picked up. Lahiri's choices in imagery focus the aspects of Gogol's experience he wishes to relay to the reader.

In The Namesake, author Jhumpa Lahiri describes the struggles and hardships of an immigrant couple who form a new life in a country whose customs are completely at odds with those to which they are accustomed.

After Ashoke and Ashima are married in a traditional ceremony in India, they move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke has been assigned a teaching position. Their baby boy is named Gogol, after a Russian author whose story the young Ashoke was reading when a terrible train accident occurred, and he was saved from the death that took so many others. At first, he does not tell his son why his name has been given to him, and Gogol fights internally to find himself, feeling that this name sometimes impedes him because people think it odd or even ridiculous. Also, Gogol struggles with the two cultures in which he finds himself.

One of the literary techniques that the author, Lahiri, employs is argument in its different forms, for he uses different appeals to the importance and strength of family. Pathos (an emotional appeal) is especially used to involve readers' sympathies.

Here are other examples of literary techniques:

• Alliteration (The repetition of an initial consonant sound)

And yet for some reason it is dependence...he feels. He feels free of responsibility  /f/  (Chapter 6)

swing wildly in the wind /w/ (Ch. 6)

Again he tastes the dust on his tongue, sees the twisted train....He was born twice in India,...then a third time in three lives by thirty. /t/ (Ch. 7)

• Anaphora (The intentional repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs (www.freedictionary.com)

In Chapter 6, Gogol feels most comfortable in his room at Yale:

He likes its oldness, its persistent grace. He likes that so many students have occupied it....He likes the solidity of its plaster walls....He likes the dormer window

• Parallelism (The use of successive constructions in prose that correspond in grammatical construction.)

"too many cars, too many tall buildings.... (Ch.5)

In Chapter 6, while her husband is gone, Ashima feels productive and sets about many tasks; however, after some time, she becomes lonely.

She stares at her empty tea cup....which she'd had to turn off. She began to shiver...She pulls her sari.... (Ch. 6)

• Figurative language (words or expressions that have a meaning that is different from the literal interpretation)

There are certain images that wipe him flat. (Ch.1)

...the constant parade of sounds

• Imagery (The use of language that appeals to the senses)

The sparkling empty streets, the polished black cars, the rows of gleaming white houses.... (visual imagery, Ch.1)

• Simile (A comparison between two unlike things using the words "like" or "as")

...six or eight weeks passing like a dream" (Ch.3)

[from the story "The Overcoat"]...Petrovish's big toe, "with its deformed nail as thick and hard as the shell of a tortoise."

...when Akaky was robbed in "a square that looked to him like a dreadful desert." (Ch.1)

Some literary techniques used by Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake include sensory detail, description, imagery. Literary techniques are a category of the two literary devices from which an author chooses freely to create the details of a novel, play, poem or short story. Literary elements, on the other hand, include tone and mood (also called atmosphere). Lahiri's narratorial tone is objective, though sympathetic, and confident. The mood she creates within the setting of the story varies. For example, it is sometimes one of thoughtfulness and sometimes one of agitated discontent.

Of literary techniques, Lahiri uses many sensory details in The Namesake. She tells the texture, smell and appearance of things from food to clothes. In close connection with sensory detail, Lahiri also gives detailed descriptions of what her characters wear, where they go, what they look at as well as what their feelings and actions are. The imagery--the mental visions triggered by the sensory detail and descriptive detail--is heightened to a level that some critics called "lyrical," which is akin to poetical.