The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri’s portrayal of her father’s move to the United States is told with the fluidity and descriptive detail required of any good storyteller. Even though it isn’t her own experiences that she writes about, Lahiri effectively captures the attention to detail that one encounters when in a new place, especially a new country. You notice the small things such as the fact that “Americans drove on the right side of the road, not the left, and that they called a lift an elevator and an engaged phone busy” (2070), as well as the ways and customs unfamiliar to you as the narrator expresses that “even the simple chore of buying milk was new to me; in London we’d had bottles delivered each morning to our door” (2071). This reminds me of one of the many customs I became acquainted with while in Peru. Instead of brewing coffee with water in a coffeemaker, they heat milk and mix it with instant coffee- this made for an embarrassing first morning when handed a cup of hot milk instead of the coffee I’d asked for, I hesitantly proceeded to drink it so as not to offend. They politely laughed at me and explained the difference in their café con leche and our coffee. Because of this and other experiences, I sympathize with the narrator and his concerns about needing to “tell [Mala] which streets to avoid, which way the traffic came, tell her to wear her sari so that the free end did not drag on the footpath” (2079). It is both embarrassing and intimidating not knowing the basic customs of a culture; you feel like a child learning for the first time. Despite this, the narrator appears not to have encountered much ridicule or embarrassment over such issues and Lahiri, unlike authors we read earlier in the semester, portrays the “American Dream” in a positive light. After years of studying, making a life for him and his wife, and growing accustomed to life in America, this man knows “that [his] achievement is quite ordinary…Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept” (2083), and he has survived and grown from each new experience. Like the attitude of Jackson Jackson in Alexie’s story, the narrator’s perspective and approach towards this new adventure I think greatly influenced his success; not necessarily society’s idea of success, but rather his own.

What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie


I absolutely loved the short story What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie. He does an amazing job of juxtaposing humor (not cheesy humor, but real, honest, if-we-weren’t-laughing-we’d-probably-be-crying humor) and Jackson Jackson’s potentially desperate situation. In one scene, Jackson returns to Junior who has been passed out but still breathing for hours and once he realizes “he was alive…[he] took off his shoes and socks and found one dollar in his left sock and fifty cents in his right sock” (2060). This I think reveals the unusually quirky, yet familial relationship of these two men. I don’t perceive this act as stealing, but instead showing the brotherly bond of these two coping with homelessness together. However, the next time Jackson Squared goes back to check on Junior, he finds that he is missing, stating “I later heard he had hitchhiked down to Portland, Oregon, and died of exposure in an alley behind the Hilton Hotel” (2062). Up until this point, you get the sense that this volley between getting money and spending it, once again, on alcohol is more of a game than a life-threatening state of existence. Junior’s death cements the fact that, while it often doesn’t seem like it what with Jackson’s apparent witty, humorous outlook on life, this was and still is a legitimate struggle for the homeless. I love how Alexie portrays Jackson Jackson as “an effective homeless man” (2055) through his past, his big heart, and his imperfect character, bringing the humanity back into a facet of society that many have dehumanized as inferior to everybody else. While you want to ridicule Jackson for his self-inflicted hardships and for the fact that once he finally does acquire money, he repeatedly “spent it to buy three bottles of imagination” (2058), you can’t help but root for him in his quest to find something more than money can buy, something greater than even the regalia itself, but rather the thing he’s “been disappearing [from] ever since” (2055).

The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov

The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov instantly drew me in with the structure of the poem, the punctuation, and most importantly my perceived interpretation. The structure progresses slowly, a little bit at a time, similar to the healing over time after “love cracked [you] open” (1488). During this healing you can take life only a little bit at a time, dealing with small doses of reality as they come. I’m not entirely sure what Levertov meant by each carefully placed colon, period, hyphen, etc. but I personally love punctuation and the way it can make or break a sentence, change the entire meaning of a passage, or cause the reader to overthink the meaning behind such placement (as I’m probably doing right now) and I feel like, with her attention to detail in the rest of the poem, she meant something by it. 

As far as the content of the poem goes, I think it perfectly, and yet vaguely, describes the period of healing after a break up, the loss of a loved one, or any such devastating event. The opening eight lines “who’d believe me if I said, ‘they took and split me open from scalp to crotch, and still I’m alive, and walk around pleased with the sun and all the world’s bounty’” (1488) seem to me to explain those moments during this time of healing when people ask the customary “how are you?” and since you know they either wouldn’t care to hear about your troubles or they wouldn’t believe that you were still functioning, you respond with the programmed “good”. Instead of confiding in your friends and family, you bury yourself deep in the third dimension where no one can see what’s really going on. And you fake a smile “here in the sweet sun” (1489), putting on a mask of “fiction, while [you] breath and change pace” (1489) and figure out how to reply with an honest “good” again.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

There were parts of this play that I both loved and hated. To start off, I couldn’t stand the mother! She immediately reminded me of the typical overbearing mother such as from the book Pride and Prejudice or the movie Penelope. She talks solely for the love of her own voice and desperately, pathetically tries to marry off her daughter who, in her mind, clearly has no hope of finding a man without her meddling. Most likely the reason Laura “lives in a world of her own- a world of little glass ornaments” (pg. 1291) and the cause of her husband’s and Tom’s eventual departure, Amanda herself seems to live in a world of her own- a world of pretty dresses and gentleman callers by the dozen. As shallow as she is judgmental, Amanda appears to have never actually seen Laura for the imaginative, pretty girl that Jim notices after just an evening of being around her. Which brings me, in my opinion, to the more successful aspect of the play. Throughout the story, Laura submits to her mother’s incessant bickering with a quiet grace, she endures her mother and brother’s constant fighting, and she apparently has no idea how pretty she is- “in a very different way from anyone else. And all the nicer because of the difference, too” (pg. 1308). While, at first, she seems painfully awkward and destined to be a spinster for the rest of her life (through the eyes of her mother), all Laura ever really needed was someone to see her true beauty and to build confidence in her in order to do away with her inferiority complex that she, again, most likely got from her boastful, overly confident mother. I think by the end of the play, when “we cannot hear the mother’s speech, her silliness is gone” (pg. 1313), Laura appears triumphant as “she lifts her head to smile at her mother” (pg. 1313). By this small gesture, I got the sense that Laura is now equipped with the confidence needed to face both her mother’s insensitive comments and whatever her future may hold, without the help of Jim, her brother, or anybody else.

A Decade by Amy Lowell

The romantic in me instantly loved the poem A Decade by Amy Lowell. It’s so beautifully descriptive and yet it doesn’t over exaggerate the love that’s being described with excessively flowery language; it’s just honest. It immediately brought to mind the picture of what a healthy relationship would look or sound like after having stood the test of time, which from the title we can assume is a decade. With the first two lines “when you came, you were like red wine and honey, and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness” (pg. 979) the reader gets the sense of what it’s like at the start of any new relationship. The other person seems perfect, their strengths override any flaws that may have shown through, everything is painfully sweet and seems too good to be true. Then over time they become “like morning bread, smooth and pleasant” (pg. 979), not too sweet, not too bitter, but the nourishment that sustains you throughout the day. Like any healthy relationship, the highs shouldn’t be too high and the lows shouldn’t be too low, but rather a constant that keeps you strong throughout the struggles of everyday life. The last two lines “I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour, but I am completely nourished” (pg. 979) are what I imagine it would be like after years in such a relationship. Not that you wouldn’t notice the other person there, but instead they’ve grown  to be such a part of you and a part of your life that you can hardly distinguish between your life and theirs. Instead of the pang of sweetness of adjusting and fitting this person into your life in the beginning, they have now filled a whole you previously were unaware of and would therefore be empty without them. The relationship has evolved from a state of overwhelming sweetness to a steady fulfillment that leaves you content and nourished.

Neighbor Rosicky by Willa Cather

I’m glad we got extra time to blog about Neighbor Rosicky by Willa Cather because I really enjoyed it. I’ve read My Antonia, also by Cather, in the past and I found several similarities between the two. Both compare the vast differences in living in a town or city and living out in the country, favoring the farm life. I found Cather’s obvious love of the country and the beauty of nature to be refreshing and her apparent distrust of humanity (particularly those residing in the city) amusing. Her description of “the clump of orchard behind and the windmill before, and all down the gentle hill-slope the rows of pale gold cornstalks stood out against the white field” (pg. 842) brings to mind something perhaps from the childhood of Huck Finn and makes me want to raise my children in the country where they “could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of sky over [them], hear the wagons go by” (pg. 842). Also, the fact that “the worst things he had come upon in his journey through the world were human- depraved and poisonous specimens of man” (pg. 854) I thought was sadly accurate, but also amusing. That makes me sound really jaded but, like Rosicky, I too wish it were possible for my children to “get through the world without ever knowing much about the cruelty of human beings” (pg. 854), but that unfortunately is of course unrealistic.

I also fell in love with the character of Anton Rosicky. His outlook on life is just so fresh and optimistic and he certainly “had a special gift for loving people…it was quiet, unobtrusive, it was merely there” (pg. 856). Rosicky is that typical loving, warm-hearted grandpa character that everyone wants around. He was indeed a hard worker, he had to be living on a farm, but Rosicky also knew how to fully enjoy life: “…somehow he never saved anything. He couldn’t refuse a loan to a friend, and he was self-indulgent. He liked a good dinner, and a little went for beer, a little for tobacco; a good deal went to the girls” (pg. 845). Rosicky managed to get by in life, raise his family up right, work hard, but still stop to smell the roses and live a little, and for that I admire him (fictitious as he may be).

In the Land of the Free


From the title of the story In the Land of the Free by Edith Maud Eaton, you immediately get the sense of irony that the author implies from the beginning. I went into it fully expecting some tragic example of how "free" America really can be and, alas, Eaton delivered. My heart went out to the mother, Lae Choo who, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, was separated from her two year old son upon her arrival in the United States. I have a daughter myself and can only imagine how Lae Choo felt being apart from her young child indefinitely, especially in a foreign country. I think once you're a parent, only then can you fully know "what it is to miss the feel of the little fingers and the little toes and the soft round limbs of your little one" (pg. 804) and therefore understand the emptiness that comes with their absence. And the fact that James Clancy, the lawyer, exploits the mother's desperate determination to get her son back in order to make as much money off of the couple as possible makes me sick. In response to Lae Choo's comment "you not one hundred man good; you just common white man", Clancy replies with an ironic "yes, ma'am" (pg. 807), revealing the fact that this is just another business transaction to him. He's not only okay with potentially tearing this family apart, as revealed in the end of the story with the son's reaction to his mother, but Clancy seems to be proud of the fact that his actions are typical for the "common white man". It's stories like these that make me ashamed to call myself American, especially since we're known to be and often portrayed as corrupt and unjust.

Roman Fever

The short story, Roman Fever by Edith Wharton seems to me to be nothing more than a commentary on the catty nature of women. While reading I was expecting or hoping  for some significant or tragic event that would lead Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley to realize the meaningless nature of their perpetual one-upmanship, but was disappointed to find no such realization. Instead the story progressed through dialogue, both internal and external, unveiling the true nature and driving force of this lifelong "friendship". Magnified, no doubt, by the fact that both women were wealthy widows with "a good deal of time to kill" (pg. 779), they were left to "visualize each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope" (pg. 781), rather than use their time productively. I think through the circumstance involving Mr. Slade that occurred some twenty years prior, Wharton does a good job of portraying the fact that "girls have such silly reasons for doing the most serious things" (pg. 786), a fact that is unfortunately all too true. Had Mrs. Slade confronted her friend about the issue way back when it occurred, she may not have spent her whole life resenting Mrs. Ansley and perhaps could have moved past it and led a somewhat happy life. But then again, where would American Literature be without loveless relationships and petty grievances?