Analyzing Jhumpa Lahiri's My Two Lives

In the Disney Channel’s hit TV show Hannah Montana, actress Miley Cyrus was living ‘the best of both worlds’, yet in reality everyone who has two worlds does not necessarily enjoy it. In Lahiri’s My Two Lives she discusses her two lives and the struggles that come along with it. “Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen” (Lahiri 97). Combining the methods of narration, compare and contrast and exemplification, Lahiri tells her story. One method Lahiri uses throughout the passage is narration. She uses this to explain her life when she was young, her life while growing up, and her life now. Lahiri starts with a flashback to her years in London, explaining how she wasn’t always a subject to the term “Indian-American” (Lahiri 97). Yes, she allows the readers to know that she was not always defined as an “Indian American”, but she never allows the readers to know anything about her time in London. It was very brief, …show more content…
Compare and contrast should have been used more in-depth to allow the readers to fully understand what she meant by being raised as and American and as an Indian. Definition was not used either in this passage. Lahiri does not ever define what culture is, nor does she define any of the cultures she talks about: American, Italian-American, Irish-American or Indian-American. Neither does she define what she was labeled as during her time in London. The method cause and effect should have been used to let the readers realize how certain Indian traits effected how she grew up. She could have used it to describe how her school life as a child effected her into becoming an adult. Lahiri wrote a good passage, but never allowed the readers to truly understand the concepts she was