Question

Theme of " The Third and Final Continent

Answer 1

Many of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories deal with the difficulties immigrants have in adjusting to alien cultures. Lahiri admits that “The Third and Final Continent” was based in part on what her father told her about his coming from Calcutta to the United States, where he, too, became a university librarian. The author stresses the fact that any immigrant from a country like India, where everyone lives surrounded by a large extended family, will feel alienated in a society in which people so value their privacy that they are content to live as strangers. Thus the narrator of “The Third and Final Continent” can adjust to a diet of corn flakes and bananas but finds it more difficult to get used to being isolated. Therefore it means a great deal to the narrator when Helen tells him that he has gained the approval of her mother, who judges everyone by the high standards of an earlier time. By accepting him, she becomes his friend.