The Theme Of Diaspora and Emotional Malaise in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri is an award-winning author and translator who is known for her short stories. Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New Yorker Prize for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Los Angeles Times Award nomination. Except for two pieces set in Bengal with no reference to the United States, the book contains nine short stories that depict various elements of the lives of Bengalis, their children, and their grandchildren who have turned, in varied degrees, American.  The characters in all of the short stories go through an emotional crisis, remain disturbed until the conclusion, and are utterly trapped in the psychological conflict. As a result, the focus of this study is on the emotional distress that the protagonists in the Interpreter of Maladies stories experience