Comparing Jhumpa Lahiri's The Third And Final Continent

The killer story: a story of kidnapping, shooting, smashing, shouting, all of which centers around a hero who is often the instigator of his own conflict. This is the story told so often in our society, and seems to only become more common--and more creatively violent-- as the years pass. In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin proposes a new type of story which features the common human being, and their struggles with everyday life. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” is one such story. Applying Le Guin’s theory to Lahiri’s story helps to create a better understanding of its narrative structure and theme.

The killer story, according to Le Guin, is the shape of an “arrow or spear,” which travels in a straight, predictable path, and inevitably ends up “hitting its mark,” which will promptly die (169). The narrative must also feature a conflict which is the “central concern,” as well as the Hero’s adventure throughout the novel (Le Guin 169). Alternatively, there is the carrier bag story, a container which holds the narrator’s life. Conflict or struggle in this container are not the feature of the story, but “necessary elements of a whole” which do not act towards a resolution, they are only small parts of a “continuing process” of the narrator’s life (Le Guin 169).

In Lahiri’s container are him, his friends and family, and his wife --who is not overly beautiful, romantic, or “perfect,” but human and relatable and important in her own right-- and together they travel into the huge unknown. According to Le Guin, a carrier bag story must feature “people” similar to Lahiri’s, and in the author’s bag should be a variety of such: those who are brave, and those who are “wimps,” people “who don’t understand,” and their plans and aspirations “that fail”