The Third & Final Continent Themes
Themes 1) The Indian immigrant’s struggle in a new country.
“The pace of life in North America is different from Britain, as you will soon discover”, the guidebook informed me. “Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t expect an English cup of tea.”
“Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless emergencies, and a fleet of buses rambled past their doors opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times suffocating.”
2) The Indian immigrant’s fear of losing his own culture.
“In 1969, when I was thirty-six years old, my own marriage was arranged.” – The fact that he had an arranged marriage proves he doesn’t want to lose his culture and go the Western way.
3) The methods of steps of copying to a new culture and a new life in America.
“In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes and milk morning and night, and bought some bananas for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask, he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on the way to work each morning, and brewed the four cups I drank in the course of the day. I bought a larger carton of milk, and learned to leave it on the shaded part of the windowsill, as I had seen other residents at the YMCA do. To pass the time in the evenings I read the Boston Globe downstairs, in a spacious room with stained-glass windows. I read every article and advertisement, so that I would grow familiar with things, and when my eyes grew tired I slept.”
Questions 1) Explain how the narrator’s last visit to Mrs. Croft is significant. Give two reasons. Support your answer with the phrases/words.
The narrator and his wife, Mala, had visited
“The pace of life in North America is different from Britain, as you will soon discover”, the guidebook informed me. “Everybody feels he must get to the top. Don’t expect an English cup of tea.”
“Car horns, shrill and prolonged, blared one after another. Flashing sirens heralded endless emergencies, and a fleet of buses rambled past their doors opening and closing with a powerful hiss, throughout the night. The noise was constantly distracting, at times suffocating.”
2) The Indian immigrant’s fear of losing his own culture.
“In 1969, when I was thirty-six years old, my own marriage was arranged.” – The fact that he had an arranged marriage proves he doesn’t want to lose his culture and go the Western way.
3) The methods of steps of copying to a new culture and a new life in America.
“In a week I had adjusted, more or less. I ate cornflakes and milk morning and night, and bought some bananas for variety, slicing them into the bowl with the edge of my spoon. In addition I bought tea bags and a flask, which the salesman in Woolworth’s referred to as a thermos (a flask, he informed me, was used to store whiskey, another thing I had never consumed). For the price of one cup of tea at a coffee shop, I filled the flask with boiling water on the way to work each morning, and brewed the four cups I drank in the course of the day. I bought a larger carton of milk, and learned to leave it on the shaded part of the windowsill, as I had seen other residents at the YMCA do. To pass the time in the evenings I read the Boston Globe downstairs, in a spacious room with stained-glass windows. I read every article and advertisement, so that I would grow familiar with things, and when my eyes grew tired I slept.”
Questions 1) Explain how the narrator’s last visit to Mrs. Croft is significant. Give two reasons. Support your answer with the phrases/words.
The narrator and his wife, Mala, had visited