Ritual. But the difference between audience and character means that Lahiri
also guides her audience’s responses to Mala’s responses. As a result, the audi-
ence’s sympathies for all three characters deepen even as their ethical appro-
bation of all three increases, and thus, the convergent narration is even more
affectively and ethically powerful.
MASK NARRATION
After the turning point, Lahiri has the character narrator cover, first, the “hon-
eymoon of sorts” he and Mala enjoyed, and second, the next thirty years of
his life, years that included their becoming parents to a son. Lahiri ends the
story with a passage that morphs from the character narrator’s thoughts about
his son to mask narration, with the pivot occurring with his reference to the
astronauts:
In my son’s eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world.
In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected.
But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is
happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive
on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the
astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained
in this new world for nearly thirty years. 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. 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. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times
when it is beyond my imagination. (197–98)Lahiri’s narration employs a thicker filter than Fitzgerald’s at the end of
The Great Gatsby, but it too is mask narration because Lahiri uses it to the-
matize the character narrator’s experiences. That thematizing is in line with
Koshy’s description of “Final Continent” as an “epic short story” in which the
character narrator stands in for a whole generation of Indian men (“I am not
the only man”). But what is especially effective here is Lahiri’s reference to
the astronauts. First, the character narrator’s comparison sets up his double-
sided interpretation of his experience, his assessment of it as both “ordinary”
(unlike theirs) and “beyond [his] imagination” (like theirs). The comparison
also points to the extraordinary temporal dimension of his immigration and
naturalization, one that makes so much difference to his son. Second, the
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