Three Names

Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine is the story of a young Indian girl living, and adapting to life, in America. She is given many names in the first few chapters of the book, specifically Jane, Jasmine, and Jyoti. Who is Jane? She seems to be one girl in India, but a completely different person whilst adapting to life in America. Jane's lack of identity is highlighted when she is talking about how Bud (her husband) calls her Jane. During the course of this passage, Jane remarks, "In Baden, I am Jane. Almost" (26). This excerpt signifies that Jane does not quite accept her identity. A name is the most basic form of identity a person can have, and with the title of the book as Jasmine, further questions regarding Jane's true identity are raised.

In the first chapters of Jasmine, I also paid particular attention to the writing style of Mukherjee. Most of her sentences are short, succinct, and very blunt. Take, for example, this passage when Jane is reflecting upon her age, "The truth is, I am young enough to bear children into the next century. But. I feel old, very old, millenia old..." (34). These sentences are choppy and each part of the line is accentuated, especially the 'but' as it is its own complete thought. I think this sentence structure mirrors the way Jasmine goes through life. I believe she deals with the turmoil in her life and all her obstacles by making them into palatable issues, breaking them apart, as she makes it easier for herself to move on. Jasmine, when informing the reader of the death of Pitaji, simply says, "Pitaji died the next May. He died horribly. He got off a bus in a village two hours west of us and was gored by a bull" (58). This description is impersonal. She is simply informing the reader of the death, nothing more. There is no emotion; there is no personality, as it is simply a recounting of past events. I think this brief section on the death of Pitaji illustrates Jane's tendency to minimize tragic events functions as a coping mechanism. It is difficult to get a sense of time, due to the jumping chronology of the piece, but I will be interested to see if the writing style  and sentence structure change slightly as we begin to delve deeper into the life story of the girl with three names.