The Third and Final Continent Study Guide

Jhumpa Lahiri was born to Bengali parents. The family moved to Rhode Island in 1970 because her father was offered a job as a university librarian. She visited Calcutta (now Kolkata), India frequently as a child to see her extended family. As a college student she attended Barnard College in New York City and graduated in 1989 with a B.A. in English literature, then went on to attend Boston University. There, she earned master’s degrees in creative writing, English, and literature, going on to receive a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies. While in graduate school, Lahiri published several of the stories that would later make up her successful debut collection, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Noteworthy for its depiction of Indian immigrants to America, it won the Pulitzer Prize (1999) and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction (2000). In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias, a journalist and editor for TIME Latin America. Lahiri went on to write two novels, The Namesake (2003) and Lowland (2013), along with an additional short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). In 2012, she moved to Rome, Italy and began writing in Italian. In altre parole (In Other Words, 2016) is a meditation on learning Italy’s language and culture and Dove mi trovo (Whereabouts) is a novel she wrote originally in Italian. Since 2018, she has been part of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University. She and Vourvoulias have two children. Besides receiving the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri has received an O. Henry Award, inclusion in Best American Short Stories, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and the PEN/Malumud Award for the short story.

“The Third and Final Continent” takes place in 1969, with the narrator arriving in America on, July 20, the same day as the moon landing. The moon landing was reported worldwide, and was considered to be both an incredible achievement and a marker in particular of U.S. power and American nationalist pride. The astronauts who first walked on the moon, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, were interviewed by the press and Armstrong called the event "a beginning of a new age.” Mrs. Croft, in the story, views the landing with “disbelief and delight.” It’s important to note that Mrs. Croft, born in 1866, grew up in an era where there were no electric lights, television or radio, or cars. Her constant marveling at the moon landing testify to her  event and calls it “splendid!”

“The Third and Final Continent” was one of nine stories that were collected in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies, which was published in 1999. The story collection won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is one of the few short story collections by a woman to have won. The stories in this collection cover the immigrant experience of Bengali immigrants as well as the lives of Indian-Americans born in America. Lahiri has also portrayed the experiences of this cultural group was in her other works, such as Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake and Lowland. She also explored her interest in immersion in a different culture in another way in her nonfiction book, In altre parole, in which she wrote about her own immersion in the originally unfamiliar to her language and culture of Italy. Lahiri has noted her intense study of Shakespeare and Spenser during her time as a doctoral student as an influence on her writing, and she has also referenced Russian writers Anton Chekov and Nikolai Gogol. The structure of her stories has been influenced by contemporary realists like William Trevor, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant. Lahiri has been compared to other Indian-American writers such as Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni as well as Indian writers including Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.