randomness is not so random

Jack Pollock- Painter

It does not have a specific shape or line.  Paint was thrown on a canvas at random, its liquid shapes going every which way with spatters of chaotic globs in a mass of Art  that sold for 140 million dollars.  Some may say fine Art while others would say thrown paint. Either way this perspective of randomness gives an overall pattern or a feel which is a lot like Jasmine.

Jasmine shows us her odyssey in Jasmine by Mukherjee.  She is the main character, one of nine children in Punjab, India. She is smart, courageous and pregnant with her lover’s baby.  She is in living in Iowa at the moment.  She  is in this web of life that is not linear but geometric. In the epigraph at the beginning of the book James Gleick wrote “the new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of pitted, pocked and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined”.  Mukherjee is describing how her life’s journey has been everything in that statement.  She feels and shows this new geometry through out her novel.  At first I thought the randomness of the chapters jumping around where to keep the readers attention to make it interesting but after re-reading this first line it now make sense that the new geometry is about the little things may seem random but as a whole it give us order.  The novel does not seem to have order but it really does. if you look at from Mukherjee’s perspective each individual chapter is complete with a short bit about her life’s experience. As random and un-orderly as chapters come the book moves and the sum of all the randomness makes sense.   

A summary Jasmine’s disorderly life: born, father died, husband died, exiled, raped, murdered, loved, and now takes care of Bud. She says “I envy Bud the straight lines and smooth planes of his history” (214) Mukherjee is referring to the new geometry and how her life have been anything but smooth and straight.  Bumpy and zigzag paths are more interesting anyways.  With the disorder that has happened in her life she finds purpose and meaning with each experience. Despite all the obstacles and challenges she has faced it develops her to who she is today.

At the end of the book right before Jane transitions back to Jase (the nick name taylor gave her) running away with Taylor and Duff to California, she says “adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through un-caulked windows. Watch me re-position the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross-legged above my kitchen stove” (240). She ties it all together here with the predestined fate foretold, acceptance of what was and will be, she choosing to take the next step. She moves like the wind, disorderly and random. She is carrying herself away to California. It’s a good ending point for the begging of the next chapter.