Unpredictable Bride in the Novel

¶ … Unpredictable Bride

In the novel Who Knows the Unpredictable Bride by Nathaniel Johnson Isong the bride reveals her true character once she has arrived in America because she does not love the bridegroom. Her deception is planned from the beginning to take advantage who ever sponsors her immigration into the United States. The author reveals this through a relentless account of the devious bride's deceptions and insults heaped upon the gullible bridegroom and purposely designed to disgrace and embarrass him after her arrival. The account is crafted to reveal a complex and dysfunctional relationship between a naive bridegroom who tries to purchase a wife and a manipulating bride.

Isong indicates the bride's intentions from the outset through her erratic behavior. She arrives late into Dulles International Airport and proceeds to disengage from any positive interaction with the groom. She wakes up late, disregards the grooms attempt to familiarize her with the household, and then proceeds to spend the day on the telephone with a "friend" she met on the trip to Washington. The bride reveals to the groom the money he has spent for the last five years was wasted because she has no feelings for him. The tension between the two characters created by the author continues to become more pronounced.

The bride says that her coming to America was a plan with "many people you would not believe." (98) She tells him that he ties her down and that before she entered this country she was coached about the laws and her rights. She says that people at home had discussed her various options including giving him a baby and then claiming his properties through the court, or to stay and have him pay for her education and then leave and live on her own. The bride doesn't contribute to the housework so the groom is left to do this after he'd worked all day. While the groom was working the bride would either leave the house and he would not know where she was, or be on the phone with her "evil planners who involved her in fraudulent schemes." (103)

The groom's efforts to win the heart of the bride borders on pathetic. For example, when the bride asks or money for a phone card so she can make her calls privately he gives her ten times more than enough money to do this. She claims the amount is not sufficient and refuses to take it. When he refuses to give her more she takes his office and car keys and ultimately he has to call the police to get them back. To add insult to injury she tells him of her many boyfriends back home, that she was not a virgin when they met, and the only reason she came here was to show herself to him and now that he has seen her she wants him to buy her a ticket home. And he does. She tells him that because she won't be receiving any more money from him she will have to become a prostitute in order to survive when she gets home. Even after all she's done to him he worries that she might get a disease.