In the 1^st chapter the main character Changez is having a conversation with an American sitting in a cafe in Lahore. He is a Pakistani and he is telling his American interlocutor about his American life as a student in Princeton and as a worker for the Underwood Samson, a valuation company.

In the 1^st chapter there are all themes that will be developed along the story:

- the meeting/confrontation between 2 cultures

- the importance of language

- the anticipatory skill that human beings develop whenever they meet a stranger.

So the 1^st chapter introduces Changez as the protagonist of the novel.

The 2^nd point is that the 1^st chapter sets the narrative strategy that the writer will be developing along the novel: it is the use of the dramatic monologue which is a typical form of monologue that was created in the Victorian age by Robert Browning and it employs that there is a speaker speaking to an interlocutor who never makes you hear is voice. So the reader can never hear the American man’s voice – but he knows that the American, the stranger, is there.

The 3^rd important point – in order to understand how the 1^st chapter has been structure – is that the novel offers its reader elements that help him make sense of what he will read: there is a man from Lahore, Pakistani, talking to another man, who’s supposed, he’s an American man, the language the novelist uses is the medium of the English language, we don’t know exactly what the role of the interlocutor is, the protagonist thinks he’s on a mission, it is set in a tea room in Old Anarkali, it is afternoon, it is quite warm. This is what you know, these are the information that help us have an orientation on the novel.

What kind of language is the one used by the narrator?

We have a speaker who speaks in the 1^st person – because it is a monologue – but the speaker is Pakistani. He doesn’t uses mother tongue, he uses a medium language, that is American English, to reach the interlocutor – the American stranger.

Since the interlocutor – the stranger, the American – does never answer, the first step in understanding is how do the reader knows that he is there.

What makes the interlocutor’s presence clear right from the start is his body language. (“Do not be frighten by my bear”)

And then the intelligent reader has to tick off a list of options in order to understand what allowed Changez to discover the nationality of his interlocutor. In a few term, how could he imagine, or guess, that he was an American?

This is interesting because this makes one reflect on the way human beings judge the alter – a person that one doesn’t know anything about, a person that one perceive different from a different country, from a different ethnic, origin or whatever.

Changez arrives to the conclusion that his interlocutor his American “Not by the color of your skin” but from the complexion – that is the skin – and then from his hair.

And this is exactly what people look at: somebody’s face, the way he dresses, et cetera.

People look at all these things because according to theory of geshtalt – is a German word which means ‘shape’ – whenever we meet a somebody that we don’t know we generally have global reaction - what he looks like – and then it is only in the long rang we discover details about the person. But at first we have a global initial impression that obviously is not a detail impression.

And when it comes to Changez to say what made him think about his interlocutor as a stranger from an American origin it is interesting to see how the narrator uses language when he says: “are typical of a certain type of American” which employs that there are many types of Americans.

This is an intelligent way to suggest that the human beings are generally very instinctive to judge for receive impressions as if somebody were the prototype of a culture. But prototype doesn’t exist.

As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, Changez reveals that it was the stranger’s “bearing that allow me to identify you”. There is a big problem of an identity.

People, everybody are multi-identity.

“Mission” is graphetically different from the other words, so the writer is alerting the intelligent reader that the word mission may become a key word because it is ambigual: it can be used for a mission air that is somebody who, owing to religious principals, starts his adventure looking for new believers; but it may also be a word coming from the military code where the one who is on a mission might work for the secret services; or a ‘mission’ might also be a metaphorical form of the language where you are ask to carry out a task which is secret.

This is the first word that is written in a graphetical way and then comes “type”. Types are way to classify, to simplify.

Human beings classify things according to some similarities.

And then we have “bearing”.

So the language that is been used in the 1^st chapter relays on a multilayered nature, a multilayered shades of meaning.

So in the 1^st chapter the narrator – that is Changez – exploits the human being’s habit to relate to somebody who is alter from himself.

The position of the reader is that he is the privilege interlocutor, or an interlocutor which stands more or less on the same level of the stranger.

And it is the best position: the position that gives you more options to reflect, because you are a reader and you feel like you are in front of two people who come from two different cultures, that have different ideas, and that in a way or another come together for a reason, and so you can see the contradiction of Changez and the contradiction of the American.

Making the interlocutor silenced, the novelist seems to tell the reader that ‘it is time for the world to experiment the position of somebody who has always been put on top and now has been put on the bottom (because he cannot speak). So this is a way on the part of the narrator to tell Americans – but not only to Americans – ‘try to experiment what it means to be a subject, not having the last word’.

The 1^st chapter makes us think about the way human beings judge people, life, culture, civilization and it invites to be very careful before judging somebody.

In the novel Changez also refers to films or what was happened to him when he has to talk about something. For example when he talk about the district of Old Anarkali (“…to the district of Old Anarkali – named, as you may be aware, after a courtesan immured for loving a prince…”). This is an indirect way to inform the stranger – and of course the readers – that Punjab – the country from where he comes from – had, or has a culture that was based on cadastral division (because according to that principle courtesans couldn’t marry a prince because they were from different social classes).

To sum up the chapter has an introductory function creating – through the conversation between the two characters – the pretext for the narration to makes possible to know about Changez's life. Moreover the 1^st chapter is useful to comprehend the textual type of the book: since it is only Changez who speaks to an unidentified character the novel is a dramatic monologue.

In additional it makes some reflections about stereotypes an different cultures.