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).