Fragility and Resilience Theme Analysis

In “The Third and Final Continent,” the Indian narrator’s encounters with his elderly landlady, Mrs. Croft, allow him to believe in the human capacity for tenacity and resilience in the face of life’s challenges. As a young man in Calcutta, the narrator takes care of his mother after she suffers an emotional and mental breakdown in the wake of his father’s death. His mother’s helplessness at navigating the hardships of her life makes the narrator quietly fearful that both he and others will be unable to handle traumatic events, and so he protects himself from the potential pain of losing someone to such a failure by avoiding connections in the first place. As a thirty year old man, he continues to shy away from people who react emotionally, holding himself back or going stoically about his daily life. He worries that Mala, his wife from his arranged marriage, who is soon to join him as an immigrant in Massachusetts, will be too emotional to be resilient. However, observing Mrs. Croft, who is over a century old, subtly teaches him how to be both stoic and flexible. Through her profound example of admirable resilience, he comes to see that resilience is possible, and as a result is better able to navigate his own emotional world as well as aid Mala when she arrives.

Because of his mother’s inability to adjust to widowhood, the narrator comes to believe that being emotional leads to a loss of control. Therefore, he hides his feelings and takes refuge in practical tasks. When the narrator is sixteen, his father dies. His mother then sinks “into a world of darkness from which neither [he], nor [his] brother, nor concerned relatives, nor psychiatric clinics” could save her. The narrator’s brother then, in turn, can’t face their mother’s death, and abandons his customary role as the eldest child during her funeral preparations and ceremony. The narrator takes on the burden of both becoming his mother’s caretaker in life and performing the necessary funeral rites, which takes a heavy toll on him. He seems to get through it by focusing on practical things, like cleaning his mother’s fingernails, but the story implies that this focus blocks him off from an emotional interaction with others and with the world: he neither connects with other people, nor can he appreciate the immensity of the successful moon landing.

The narrator also becomes suspicious of others who show strong emotion, particularly his wife Mala, who he fears is fragile like his mother. When they spend their first five days together, Mala cries each night because she misses her parents. Rather than console her, he avoids her by doing a practical thing: he reads a “guidebook by flashlight,” preparing for his move to Boston. Later, when he receives a letter from Mala in which she tells him she’s lonely, he is “not touched”—he seems to have no capacity at this time to sympathize with the pain or hurt of another person. His resistance to connecting with Mala is partly because they’re literal strangers, but also because he connects her with traditional women, especially his mother. When Mala cries at night, he directly thinks of how his mother died. When she arrives in Boston, he notes that she wears her sari with “bridal modesty over her head, just as it had draped my mother until the day my father died.” This connection highlights his fear that Mala, like his mother, won’t be able to cope with the difficulties of life.

However, Mrs. Croft offers the narrator a different example—of strength and resilience—and this example allows him to broaden his understanding of how people may be able to cope with hardship. As he lives with Mrs. Croft, the narrator learns that she is 103 years old and that after her own husband died she found a way to support her family by giving piano lessons for so long that they eventually ruined her hands. The narrator specifically contrasts Mrs. Croft with his own mother. He notes that widowhood “had driven my own mother insane.” Mrs. Croft, however, not only adjusted and found a way to survive, but still finds delight in the word, as exemplified by her reaction to the moon landing that she constantly describes as “splendid.” The narrator is further impressed by the fact that, when Mrs. Croft falls and breaks her hip, she has the presence of mind to call the police for assistance. In this moment, the narrator tells Mrs. Croft that what she did was “splendid,” equating her deed with the moon landing as a way to show how much he truly admires her resilience.

Mrs. Croft’s resilience inspires the narrator’s epiphany regarding his own approach to life. A meeting with Mrs. Croft and Mala proves pivotal in showing him that one can be emotional without falling apart. When the narrator brings Mala to meet Mrs. Croft, and Mrs. Croft scrutinizes his wife, the narrator feels a wave of sympathy at his wife getting evaluated as a stranger, at her bravery in immigrating to this new country where she will face so much scrutiny just to be with him. The narrator becomes aware in this moment that Mala came to Boston for no other reason than “to be my wife.” He suddenly recognizes that her death would affect him and his death would affect her. This is a breakthrough: he is able to feel emotional connection even in the knowledge of eventual loss.

After this revelation, the narrator lets himself be emotional with Mala. They discover “pleasure and solace in each other’s arms.” He shares stories about his life with her and when he tells her about his mother, she weeps. She also consoles him when Mrs. Croft dies. Thirty years later, the narrator has a strong marriage, and Mala is “happy and strong.” At the end of the story, the narrator sees himself as strong and resilient, too. He proudly notes he is “still living” and that he has “remained in this new world for nearly thirty years.” But his strength does not arise from hiding from emotion. Instead, he looks around at the now familiar world of Boston, and at his aging wife, and successful son, and brims with emotion. He is “bewildered” at “each mile,” “each meal,” “each person,” and “each room” he has encountered. He, unlike his mother, has adjusted to the challenges of life, and can feel a connection with the world even as he knows that such connections will inevitably lead to loss in the face of death.