Somebody Telling Somebody Else A Rhetorical Poetics Of Narrative

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