comparison also implicitly brings Mrs. Croft into the passage because she is so
closely associated with the astronauts. Mrs. Croft is also present through the
references to “each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room
in which I have slept.” In addition, the character narrator’s attitude of wonder
at his experience on three continents is similar to Mrs. Croft’s wonder at the
flag on the moon. Indeed, I would argue that the passage’s implicit references
to Mrs. Croft play a significant role in its persuasiveness. Above all, the mask
narration effectively completes Lahiri’s exploration of the complexities, idio-
syncrasies, and wonders of immigration and naturalization.
CONCLUSION
This chapter sketches a different kind of partnership between rhetorical poet-
ics and another approach than the one between rhetorical poetics and cogni-
tive narratology in chapter 8. There the partnership is a collaboration, while
here it is a complementarity. Postcolonial and cosmopolitan theory provide
both key concepts and an attention to politics that illuminate Lahiri’s the-
matic purposes. Rhetorical poetics provides a thicker description of the means
by which Lahiri accomplishes those purposes, even as it adds to our under-
standing of the affective and ethical layers of Lahiri’s story. At the same time,
Lahiri’s practice feeds back into a rhetorical understanding not only of reliable
narration, character-character dialogue, and the synergies between them but
also of probable implausibilities. In these ways, “The Third and Final Conti-
nent” provides valuable lessons in the rhetoric of narrative communication
itself.
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