CHAPTER 11
Reliability, Dialogue, and Crossover
Effects in Jhumpa Lahiri’s
“The Third and Final Continent”
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HIS CHAPTER, which analyzes Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final
Continent,” the rich and intriguing final story in her 1999 Pulitzer
Prize–winning collection Interpreter of Maladies, brings together sev-
eral threads of this book. First, as with my discussion of the relation between
rhetorical poetics and cognitive narratology in chapter 8, I demonstrate the
complementarity between my approach and another one, here postcolonial
and cosmopolitan theory. Second, I return to the rhetorical exchanges of char-
acter narration, extending my account to the phenomenon of reliable nar-
ration. Third, I continue with attention to character-character dialogue, but
focus here on the synergies between Lahiri’s uses of dialogue and character
narration. Fourth, I come back to the discussion of probable impossibilities
and related phenomena in order to account for the remarkable climax of Lahi-
r i ’s s t o r y.
“THE THIRD AND FINAL CONTINENT”
Lahiri’s story is a moving tale about immigration: the Bengali character nar-
rator tells the story of his relocation from Calcutta to London in 1964 and
then from London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1969. Lahiri constructs
the progression of the story by intertwining two sets of instabilities: those