“Plenty of people changed their names: actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites. In history class, Gogol has learned that European immigrants had their names changed at Ellis Island, that slaves renamed themselves once they were emancipated. Though Gogol doesn’t know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself, simplifying his surname at the age of twenty-two, from Gogol-Yanovsky to Gogol, upon publishing in the Literary Gazette” (Lahiri 97).
Gogol is not very happy or pleased with his name and would like to have it changed. His name has been a constant struggle for him throughout the book and he always found himself wondering why he did not have an Americanized name like his peers and his younger sister. Gogol grew up knowing that he was named after the author of his fathers favorite book. What Gogol does not realize at this point of the book is that his name has a much more important meaning than what he knows. The narrator of the novel alludes to celebrities, such as writers—including the writer Gogol is named after—and actors, as people who have had their names changed. The narrator also alludes to people in history, such as revolutionaries, immigrants, and slaves, to give more examples of people who have changed their names before. Gogol is making the decision to change his name into something less unique and less foreign in order to gain a new confidence and assimilate to American society easier. To explain this, the author therefore used a series of allusions or references to point out that name changes were quite common in America and that Gogol changing his name is not an uncommon desire in American society like it is in his parents home country.
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