Student Question
What literary devices are used in "The Third and Final Continent"?
Quick answer:
In "The Third and Final Continent," Jhumpa Lahiri uses several literary devices, including imagery, understatement, dialogue, and metaphor. Imagery tracks the narrator's cultural assimilation through food. Understatement conveys emotional depth subtly. Dialogue characterizes Mrs. Croft, bridging the narrator's transition between cultures. Finally, metaphor compares immigration to space travel, highlighting the narrator's profound experience.
Jhumpi Lahiri, until near the end of the story, uses a series of simple imagery to convey how the unnamed, first-person narrator gradually acclimates to western culture after leaving Bengal, India. Food is a unifying image that helps track his progress. For example, when he moves to London:
We lived three or four to a room, shared a single, icy toilet, and took turns cooking pots of egg curry, which we ate with our hands on a table covered with newspapers.
But by the time he gets to Cambridge, outside of Boston, in the United States:
I went to a supermarket called Purity Supreme . . . In the end I bought a carton of milk and a box of cornflakes.
Eating cornflakes with a spoon becomes a unifying image, the iconic processed food showing his greater assimilation into western culture.
Lahiri also uses understatement , a literary device that...
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backs author away from an emotion to leave the writer room to experience it:
before leaving for London, I had watched her [the narrator's mother] die on that bed.
The simple statement above packs more emotional punch than the narrator handwringing and emoting would.
Lahiri uses the literary device of dialogue to characterize Mrs. Croft, an important character who acts as a bridge for the narrator between India and America because she is at once wholly old fashioned (being 100) and wholly American:
"Lock up!" she commanded. She shouted even though I stood only a few feet away. "Fasten the chain and firmly press that button on the knob! This is the first thing you shall do when you enter, is that clear?"
At the end, Lahiri for the first time uses the literary device of having the narrator, who up to this point has relied on journalistic detachment and descriptive detail, to ruminate on his huge transition to another culture. At one point, he uses the literary device of metaphor to describe what it is like to be an immigrant. Comparing immigration to traveling to outer space conveys what the narrator went through in a powerful way:
While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years.