Popular Culture Review 30.2
That is it for the book�no more Fab Four talk�but it is more than enough to set the tone and to establish a position , which is that Vonnegut understands a core value and purpose of art�to give people a reason to live , and since the Beatles are a transcendent example of this purpose , the statement may inspire readers of Timequake who have not heard the Beatles to correct that lack at their first opportunity .
More effective than these writers in using the Beatles to develop character ( Foer ) while implying a universal truth about their genius ( Vonnegut ), all without name-checking , as Murakami does , a bunch of their songs , is Jhumpa Lahiri , whose novel The Namesake ( 2003 ) draws upon the foursome at two key junctures in the life of her Indian-American protagonist Gogol Ganguli . Lahiri integrates their music so seamlessly into his inner life that a reader not familiar with the two albums ( technically , one album and one compact disc ) cited would miss altogether the poignancy of each reference . Not to hear the songs that Gogol hears in these scenes�not , that is , to know the music well enough to know that Lahiri is testing her readers ’ knowledge of the band ’ s oeuvre�is to be left , without realizing it , with a diminished sense of what the Beatles mean to her hero and to the world in general . It also means missing a crucial link between the rhetorical terms “ reference ” and “ allusion .” With Gogol ’ s happiness in the balance , these two terms breach their apparent differences , impinging on and complementing each other to the sound of the Beatles . To a reader who is at once a Beatles enthusiast , a student of rhetoric , and an aficionado of literary fiction , The Namesake , is a red-letter day .
4