ANALYSIS OF AN EXTRACT FROM MOSHIN

HAMID'S “THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

The present text is meant to analyze an extract taken from chapter three from Moshin Hamid's “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. The sequence considers the moment when the protagonist is telling the interlocutor about the new districts of Lahore.

The narrator's fictional choice is to resort to the drammatic 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 the World Trade Center attack and the global relationship America and the alter world.

Indeed the speaking voice is Changez, a Pakistani young man that wants to draw the stranger's attention on the similarities7differences between Manhattan and Lahore's new districts. This is done on purpose: Changez sounds ironical when compairs Manhattan to the new parts of Lahore. You can realize it in the use of exclamation marks: “like Manhattan? Yes, precisely!” The stranger might feel rather surprised in front of the comparation since the speaker has just expressed a social and political point of view relying on an urban as well as social divide comparation.

Indeed, the divide – a social one – has been anticipated by the contrast sending back to “ an ancient hierarchy” that justapposing “the mounted man and the man on foot” brings to focus the opposition poot versus rich. The intelligent reader immediatly percive the poor corresponds to Pakistan, while the rich recalls well of 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 feelinf at home in Manhattan, a sinnedoche for New York, when he reminds him that Urdu, his mother tongue, could be heard in New York as well as the typical food could be tasted at the Puk Punjab Dheli,to conclude with his memory of a song “which I have sang at my cousin's weddind”.

It goes without saying that irony is a defence weapon by means of which when Changez found himself to live in New York, he tried to overcome a sense of nostalgia through his senses. His means of surviving the cultural schock are suitablero implicity emotionally highlight a cultural difference which he managed to overcome intelectually.

It follows that Changez's aim is to establish an empathy with the interlocutor. Indeed Americans are often very proud of their origins ande think that American way of think and point of view is always right. With the irony the protagonist is trying to suggest that everything should be viewed by different points of view.