Until the final story, we've gotta say the stories have more than their share of disillusionment and despair. You have characters losing babies, being separated from their families, being rejected, abandoned, raped.
But then there's "The Third and Final Continent": a simple story that doesn't try to be more than it is. Just the reminiscence of a kind, honest man who works hard at his job, pays his rent on time, and takes care of his wife and son in a Boston suburb.
That's why the last lines of the story and book are so touching. The narrator admits: "I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first" (TFC 151). Honest, humble, self-aware.
Then the narrator moves from using simple, short sentences to using a sentence that takes up about three lines—a sentence that just exudes the wonder of being human through lots of repetition: "Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept" (TFC 151).
What does being human mean here? It means all the little things a person does in his or her daily life—walking, working, eating, sleeping.
That's a way different measure of human progress and achievement than the "mere hours" the astronauts spend "on the moon" (TFC 151). In other words, the narrator challenging that idea of human progress and basically saying, "Hey, let's give props to what we little people do down here on Earth every day. And being in it for the long haul."
The narrator is awed by the ordinariness of life: "As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination" (TFC 151). And we don't know about you, but the narrator's final words in the last story made us think again about all the other stories we just read, and feel a wonder about each character, each event, and each moment of connection.