The present text is ment to analyse an extract taken from chapter 3 from Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The sequence considers the moment when the protagonist is telling the interlocutor about the new districts in Lahore.

The narrator’s fictional choice is to resort to the dramatic monologue as the most suitable means to silence the Stranger, his interlocutor, with the clear aim to bring to surface an Eastern perspective on events like twin towers’ attack and the global relationship America and the alter world.

Indeed the speaking voice is Changez a Pakistani young man that wants to focus the Stranger’s attention on the similarities/differences between Manhattan and Lahore’s new districts. This is done of purpose: Changez sound ironical when he compares Manhattan to the new parts of Lahore. You can see realized it in the use of the exclamation marks: “like Manhattan? Yes preciously!”. The stranger might feel rather surprise in front of the comparison since the speaker has just expressed a personal, social and political point of view, dealing on urban as well as social divide comparison. Indeed the divide -a social one- has been anticipated by the contrast sending back to “an ancient hierarchy” that juxtaposing “the mounted man” and “the man on foot” brings to focus the opposition poor vs rich. The intelligent reader immediately perceive the poor correspond to Pakistan, while the rich the rich recalls well-off Manhattan.

There is no need to develop the dichotomy further because each lexical choice in the extract underlines it: Changez tries apparently to convince the Stranger of his feeling at home in Manhattan, a synecdoche for New York, when he reminds him that Urdu, his mother tongue, could be tasted at the Puk Punjab Dehli, to conclude with his memory of a song “which I have danced at my cousin’s wedding”. It goes without saying that irony is a defence weapon by means of which when Changez found himself to live in New York his senses. His means of surviving the cultural shocks are suitable to implicit the emotional highlight a cultural difference which he managed to overcome intellectually.

On the other hand there will be anyway a social and cultural divide between Eastern and Western people. Even if Changez has absorbed many experiences in Pakistan like flying on an airplane or feeling the high of Himalaya’s mounts, he is not ready to experience the high of the skyscraper where he works. This is a metaphor which refers to the social and cultural difference between Pakistan and America in an implicit way.

In conclusion people have to know alter cultures, according to the similarities and differences from their own one. For a real globalization there is not the need to become everyone the same, cancelling every culture for a selected one, but just accepting what we have not in common and consider it as a strong point, not as a difference from which we have to escape or fear.