The first chapter of the “Reluctant Fundamentalist” introduces the main character Changez and his interlocutor, an American man. They are conversing in a café. The reader understands that there is an interlocutor through the description made by the protagonist about him. This chapter creates the atmosphere that characterize  the novel. Changez starts speaking without giving any chance of answering to the other man. Through this expedient the narrator introduce the dramatic monologue that characterize the whole novel. He also inserts a relevant theme of the novel: the narration of a story that everyone knows from a different point of view. The reader couldn’t understand this in the first chapter. However by reading the novel he would finally understand narrator’s intentions. 

Moreover in the first chapter Changez starts telling his story and his experiences in America that took him in Pakistan again. This chapter presents the first transition from the café to the events and places that Changez has lived earlier. This technique is common in all the chapters, so it is the base for the creation of the whole novel.