Critically discuss Lahiri's literary devices and authorial style in Chapter 5 of The Namesake.

A sampling of Lahiri's authorial style and use of literary
devices can be gotten from the beginning of Chapter 5 of The
Namesake. Lahiri's authorial style employs a
bold direct tone that is obvious from the beginning of the chapter in the direct
statements and specific vocabulary of the first sentence: "Plenty of people changed
their names: actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites." He also employs
tense to reinforce his points in a subtle way. For
instance, he uses past tense to underscore acts of free volition ("People changed";
"slaves renamed") while using the past tense in perfective aspect (had + -ed
verb) for actions enforced upon others, as in "immigrants had their names
changed at Ellis Island" (had changed is interrupted by the noun
phrase their
names).

Digression
helps Lahiri elaborate upon both his story and his characters, such as for Gogol Ganuli
when Lahiri digresses from the central story line to tell a separate brief, loosely
related though significant story about the character's namesake, the Russian author
Nikolai Gogol-Yanovsky, or just Gogol. In addition, Lahiri nestles important details  in
blankets of preliminary minutia as when he
writes:

Gogol
Ganguli does the same. He rides the commuter line ... The area is somewhat familiar...
televisions ... vacuum cleaners... Museum of Science ... But he had never been ... on
his own, and in spite of the directions he's written on a sheet of paper he gets briefly
lost on his way to the Middlesex Probate and Family
Court.

Some
literary devices Lahiri uses here relate to setting,
character description, comparisons, and imagery, and he uses all in such as way as
though to recreate an actual experience for the reader. His
descriptions of setting and characters are both detailed and full of
minutia. This, as a point of comparison, is the exact opposite of Jane Austen's
descriptive approach! As an example of the minutia of setting, he writes that Gogol
"rides the commuter rail to Boston, switching to the Green Line at North Station,
getting out at Lechmere." As an example of the same for character description, he
writes: "He wears a blue oxford shirt, khakis, [and]. ... Knotted around his neck ...
yellow stripes on the diagonal."

Lahiri's use of
metaphor and simile are sparse, while his use of
imagery is prolific. These are each chosen to enhance his
aim of recreating the feeling and experience of an actual event. The beginning of
Chapter 5 has no metaphor and just one loose simile: Gogol "steps through a metal
detector, as if he were at an airport." The comparison, through simile, to the an
airport is meant to help focus in on Gogol's experience by using a more widely know
experience. As for imagery, Lahiri is liberal with sensory
imagery involving visual, as in the descriptions (e.g., "yellow stripes on the
diagonal") and tactile ("soothed by the chill of the air-conditioner"), yet there is a
profound absence of sound (auditory) imagery. The commuter train makes no sound; it is
strangely silent; the security scan station in the marble Court House has no sound;
there is an eerie absence of voices and objects being put down and picked up. Lahiri's
choices in imagery focus the aspects of Gogol's experience he wishes to relay to the
reader.