  We study the nucleon-pion-state contribution to the QCD two-point function of
the standard nucleon interpolating fields. For sufficiently small quark masses
these two-particle states are expected to have a smaller total energy than the
single-particle excited states. We calculate the nucleon-pion-state
contribution to leading order in chiral perturbation theory. Both parity
channels are considered. We find the nucleon-pion-state contribution to be
small, contributing at the few percent level to the effective mass in the
positive parity channel.
