"As she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can't help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived."
Why does Ashima feel this way following Gogol's birth? To what extent is this a manifestation of her own feelings about living in America?
- Throughout her pregnancy, which was difficult, Ashima was afraid about raising "a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare. Her son will feel at home in the United States in a way that she never does. When Gogol is born, Ashima mourns the fact that he is not surrounded by her close family. It means that his birth, " like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true."
When she arrives home from the hospital, Ashima says to her husband, " I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back."
- I think that Ashima feels alienated(separated/isolated) from being a foreigner and that compares to "a sort of lifelong pregnancy," because it is "a perpetual wait(never-ending wait), a continuous feeling out of sorts...
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