The Third and Final Continent

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The Third and Final Continent “The Third and Final Continent'' is a story of various journeys. This essay is an analysis of the one of the narrator's marriage. The journey in question takes us back to the year 1969 when the narrator's family determines a wife he is to wed. During that time, the narrator is 36 years old and living in London along with a group of Bengali bachelors. Around the time his marriage is arranged and at the end of his five-year stay in London, the narrator is offered a full-time job in the processing department of an MIT library in America. He decides to take up the opportunity but however is to fly to his native India and attend his wedding first. Being that his older brother was organizing the event, the narrator learns a number of things about his new bride Mala. The first thing he learns is that her father is a schoolteacher in Beleghata, and that she is 27 years of age. In addition, he is told that she could cook, clean, knit, embroider and sketch different landscapes. She is also able to recite poems by Tagore but sadly, a string of men had rejected her to her face because in their eyes, her talents could not make up for the fact that she did not posses a fair complexion. Nevertheless, the narrator regards the proposition “with neither objection nor enthusiasm”. To him, marriage is an inevitable aspect of life. Because of his experience with his mother, he cannot imagine how the presence of a woman can bring him any happiness. He typically presents marriage as a source of problems, not solutions to them. This further connotes and consolidates his opinion that marriage is a “duty expected of him, just as it is expected of every other man”. Before his departure from India, for five nights the narrator

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