Narrative In Once In A Lifetime By Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Once in a Lifetime” is about a girl, named Hema, talking to a teenage boy Kaushik about what happened when he entered her life again. The story is written like a letter by older Hema from a future time to Kaushik, who is not present. We don’t know what happened to him and she is writing this letter to him. The most important part of this story is that Jhumpa Lahiri uses the first and second person perspective to tell the story which helps the reader to feel familiar with the family and the culture, creates a nostalgia even if the story did not happen to the reader, helps the reader understand the relationship between “I” and “you” as well as feeling the “I”s emotions while reading, and the most importantly makes the epiphany …show more content…
The “you” voice is as important as the “I” voice, because when the story comes to the end the “you” reveals why his family came to the US, and that moment is the epiphany of the story. Hema is talking to the main character Kaushik, and the main point of view is second, however it interchanges with first person narrative. Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the story not just second person, because the story is not just about one character. It’s about both Hema and Kaushik and the time they spend together. Even though “Once in a Lifetime” switches off between points of view, second person is more present than first in the story, because even though the story is about both Hema and Kaushik, it is actually more about Kaushik, because it’s he who suddenly moved from from India to the US and stays with Hema’s family. It is he who is going through the life changing experience. It’s Kaushik whose mother’s …show more content…
Jhumpa Lahiri uses the second person point of view when the story reaches epiphany. Kaushik always goes to the forest, but no one knows. Someday, he brings Hema with him to the forest to show her a tomb. “I looked at you, confused, and so you continued, explaining that there was cancer in her breast, spreading through the rest of her body. That was why you had left India. It was not so much for treatment as it was to be left alone. In India people knew she was dying... Your mother, not wanting to be suffocated by the attention, not wanting her parents to witness her decline, had asked your father to bring you all back to America” (Oates 508) Hema tells the story directly to the reader using the second person point of view so that the reader starts thinking that Kaushik’s mother is his/her mother, and puts his/her own mother in place of Kaushik’s