In the present text I am going to analyse an extract taken from the third chapter of Mohsin Hamid’s novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. The sequence considers the scene where the protagonist is telling the interlocutor about the new districts in Lahore.

The narrator chooses the technique of the dramatic monologue, because it is the most suitable means to silence the stranger, his interlocutor in order to bring to surface an Eastern perspective on events like the Twin Towers attack and the relationship between America and the other countries, especially Eastern ones.

Indeed the protagonist and speaking voice is Changez, a Pakistani young man, that wants to draw his interlocutor’s attention on the similarities and differences between Manhattan, which is the New York’s district where rich people live and the new districts of Lahore where the richest people of the Pakistani city live. Changez is ironical when compares Manhattan and some neighbourhoods of Lahore. You can notice it easily in the use of interrogative and exclamations marks. The stranger feels surprised in front of this particular comparison, because Changez has just expressed a personal, social and political point of view on urban and social divide comparison. The social divide has been anticipated by the contrast between people who have a car and people who are forced to go on foot, because they cannot afford buying a car. This comparison reminds the opposition rich VS poor. Immediately the reader understands that the poor are Pakistani people, while the rich are American people and Western countries’ citizens. More specifically, in this case, the poor corresponds to Pakistan, while the rich corresponds to Manhattan.

The extracts is characterised by a dichotomy, that is highlighted by the narrator lexical choices and for this reason there is no need to develop it. Changez would like to convince the stranger that he felt at home in New York, when he lived in the USA, because there he could speak Urdu, his mother tongue, with other Pakistani people, eat some typical Pakistani dishes at the Pak-Punjab Delhi and listen some music that he used to listen when he was in Pakistan for his cousin’s wedding. It is now clear that irony is used as a defence weapon by Changez, when he lived in New York and tried to overcome the nostalgia for his birthplace, through his senses. His means of surviving the cultural shock he lived highlight a huge cultural difference that Changez wanted to overcome with his mind.

In conclusion the reader understands that at the beginning Changez overcame the difficulties linked to his life experience in a foreign country with his senses and feelings. After some time he was perfectly integrated in New York, because he was a good student and he behaved like an American man. The situation changed after the Twin Towers attack, when American people started to state his identity and to reject people that came from eastern countries, especially Pakistan. Changez was scared by it and he tried again to overcame his feeling of nostalgia and fear through his senses. At the end the reader understands that foreign people are integrated in the USA only if they pretend to be an American person and so behaving like American people and sharing and believing in American values. At the beginning Changez believed in American values and he thought he would have had the possibility to regain his past status in America, while at the end he realised it was not possible for foreigner and for this reason he did not believe more in American dream. More over Changez has the opposite American people’s point of view on the problem of foreigners’ integration in the USA. Indeed differently from American people, he believes that foreigner should be integrated in America, even if they are different from American people and they believe in different values. Changez’s point of view is told to the stranger, who represents the typical foreigner. He is a flat character, because he does not change his ideas during the narration, which are the American ideas about foreigners. In this way the narrator tries to make the stranger, who represents Western people, consider a new point of view, which is different from his one in order to understand that it does not exist an only vision of the word, but more than one and none of them is the totally right one.