INTRODUCTION

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel written in 2007 by Mohsin Hamid. The book is composed by twelve parts and the first of them is an introduction of the novel.

The word “Fundamentalist” refer to a form of a religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict liberal interpretation of scripture. Appeared in the 18^th and 19^th as a reaction to the disintegration of Islamic politic and economic power.

The word “Reluctant” reminds to unwilling, to a person not inclined to do something or to a person marked by hesitation or slowness because of unwillingness.

The narrator uses the monologue indirect (there isn't the “you”) and the vocative form. Thanks to this choice Hamid introduced the Dramatic Monologue that is identify by:

1) A single person utters the entire poem in a specific situation at a critical moment;

2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditor's presence and what they said and do only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

In the Reluctant Fundamentalist the dramatic monologue is conducted by Changez, who starts his conversation addressing to his listener in a street in the center of Lahore. Changez thus starts to tell the story of a period of his life for away in time, when, after graduating at Princeton, he was working as a financial counselor for an important company in New York. The formality of Changez's first approach to his interlocutor gives already that sense of ambiguity and destruct which is a recurrent theme in the whole novel.

The form of Dramatic Monologue is effective in creating a frame of mystery and tension. The reader, without a context to take as reference, is obliged to create a personal vision of what is happening. The ability of the novelist lays in the fact that he never denies any of the possible solution, so that the reader is completely free to design his own explanation.