The Overcoat Thesis

Gogol, for his part, does not seem to pick up on the additional, emotional story Ashoke desires to tell: and the scene perfectly demonstrates how his father’s reserve, forged in part by the difficulties of his life in India, meshes with Gogol’s brasher, more typically American adolescence—in which all parents are simply bossy, or annoying, or awkward.

Gogol, for his part, does not seem to pick up on the additional, emotional story Ashoke desires to tell: and the scene perfectly demonstrates how his father’s reserve, forged in part by the difficulties of his life in India, meshes with Gogol’s brasher, more typically American adolescence—in which all parents are simply bossy, or annoying, or awkward.

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Gogol begins eleventh grade in the fall, and his English teacher, Mr.

Lawson, assigns some classics of European short fiction, including Nikolai Gogol.

In the process, she is forced to confront her own partially suppressed memories.

She is assisted by Aaron, an intern working at an archive in Berlin that houses the shredded surveillance records of the former East German security service — the Ministerium for Staatssicherheit, or ‘Stasi’. Chronologically, the three works roughly follow the trajectory of 20th-century Germany and the traumatic events that shaped it, from the Second World War and the Holocaust, to the country’s division, and the rise and fall of the dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic.

He introduces himself to Kim as “Nikhil,” the first time he has done so.

Chapter 4 takes up more explicitly the differences between an “Indian” (or, more aptly, Bengali) and American adolescence.His parents, however, are thrilled to be back among their extended families, and for months they travel to different aunts’ and uncles’ houses in Calcutta, eating long meals and catching up.Gogol and Sonia feel out of place, “foreign” in the city, but Ashoke and Ashima, Gogol notices, are far more confident in their native tongue, and among their friends and relatives.Gogol and Sonia are accustomed to squabbling among themselves, to talking back to their parents (casually, and without malice), and to behaving with the kind of independence to which Americans are accustomed.But in Calcutta, among relatives, Gogol and Sonia must be on their best behavior for two reasons: because they are guests among family, and because Bengali culture demands stricter discipline, where individual desires are often set aside for group or familial ones.He does not tell his parents that he sneaks out occasionally to relax with his friends, and they certainly never suspect that he is attending parties or kissing anyone.Gogol seems to understand what his parents do not: that Bengali rules might apply to some aspects of household life, but that, in school, Gogol is an American student with American friends, and Gogol feels he ought to follow those customs, rather the customs of a culture to which he is less immediately connected.By the time summer arrives, after several months in Calcutta without sightseeing, Ashoke decides that the family will travel to Delhi and to Agra and the Taj Mahal.Gogol is surprised that his own parents are “foreigners” in non-Bengali regions of India, and though he and Sonia get sick to their stomachs on the trip, Gogol is taken by the majestic architecture of the palace in Agra.The narrator moves on to Gogol’s social life in high school, which, though not particularly robust, does include some furtive drinking and smoking, which his parents never suspect.Gogol goes with friends one night to a party at the local college (where Ashoke is a professor), and meets a college girl named Kim, whom he kisses.