Subjectivity Adrift: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, Loneliness, and the Composite Novel

Existing accounts of the relationship between literature and loneliness have praised fiction’s ability to both enhance the expression of the phenomenon and potentially play a part in its medical treatment. The present article aims to analyse the representation of loneliness in literary narrative through Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts (2021). To do so, it approaches the text and its aesthetic configuration in a twofold manner. First, it studies the subjective representation of loneliness in the novel, arguing that the anonymity of Lahiri’s narrative voice and setting afford her the possibility to abstract her character from culturally informed notions of community. This abstraction from the protagonist’s cultural environment leads to her depiction as a perennial outsider: a universal, lonely subject who lives vicariously through other experiences but fails to find solace in any lasting intersubjective connection. Secondly, the paper engages with the novel’s generic interplay with brevity, exploring how Whereabouts’ interstitial features as a composite novel (Dunn and Morris 1995)—suspended between the established taxonomic affordances of both long and short forms, and structurally interwoven with questions of fragmentariness and belonging—further enhance its aesthetic engagement with loneliness.