Response to Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime"

            I’m not really sure how I feel about this story. When I was reading it, I kept pushing through because I wanted to know what would happen between the narrator and the boy. When I got to the end, I was a bit disappointed that nothing actually happened between them. I felt dissatisfied. But now that I’ve removed myself from the story and thought about it for a few hours, I realize that it’s not really about the relationship between the narrator and the boy, but rather a story about culture – the retention of culture and the loss of culture.

            The big that stuck out to me was obviously the usage of second person. It took me the first couple pages to get used to it, but once I did, I thought that Lahiri’s style of narration was extraordinary. Normally, it’s difficult to write something in second person without running the risk of alienating the audience or making them uncomfortable. But Lahiri writes in such a way that I never felt awkward that she kept using “yous.” Instead, I felt like the use of second person created a more intimate kind of feel – the intimacy of the writing style helps strengthen the idea that the narrator had a crush on the boy, and the entire story is the things left unsaid between them.

            Though I liked the use of second person to tell the story, I also felt that it sometimes detracted from the overall impact of the story. For example, because the story is addressed to the boy, who obviously knows what he looks like and what the other people in the story look like, there is no need for a lot of physical description. Because of this, I really didn’t have a good feel for what the characters looked like – I was left to envision the stereotypical Indian-American. The voices of the different characters were strong enough to help me distinguish them from each other, but at times, I was left wanting more in the way of description.