SAMPLE OF TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF A PIECE OF NARRATIVE FROM THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST:

In the present text I’m going to analyse an extract from chapter three from Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in order to find out the deep meaning, to make my analysis more effective and to put my reflection in a better focus. The narrative passage considers the moment when the protagonist is sitting in a bar in Lahore, Pakistan, telling his interlocutor about the new districts of the city.

The narrator decides to appeal at the fictional choice of the dramatic monologue: his aim is to silence the stranger, his interlocutor, in order to present a different point of view of the story, an Easter perspective of the events like the World Trade Center Attack and the global relationship between America and the alter world. The view might be very different from the Western one.

In the first paragraph the protagonist Changez, a Pakistani young man, invites the stranger to look around: apparently he presents Lahore. Actually he wants to focus his interlocutor’s attention on the similarities/differences between Manhattan and Lahore’s new district and in particular on the inhabitants’ different status: Changez sounds ironical when he compares the two cities. Indeed you can realize the irony in the use of the exlamation mark: “Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely!”. Moreover Changez presents a difference between those who have the car and those who don’t have it. Changez presents a deep superiority of the mounted men over the men on foot. From one hand there are those who can afford it, they are rich and can take advantages from the public parks and the three-lined boulevard; on the contrary there are those poor people who can afford to buy a car, therefore they have to go on foot. Furthermore the intelligent reader understands the poor corrispond to Pakistan, whereas the rich recalls well-off Manhattan.

Changez uses the pretext to present the city to bring out all the socio-economic differences of the various inhabitants of Lahore. He explains all the contradictions in a seemingly global world. The writer indirectly criticizes the binary system that divides men into innocent and guilty, poor and rich. As a consequence there is a social-economical-cultural divide and the interlocutor might feel rather surprised in front of this.

Subsequently Changez returns to reality, coming out of abstract thinking and reporting the conversation with the stranger in the bar where they are sitting in Lahore. Changez makes us understand the world is made up of a gap between people and this is not the object of good cohabitation. Indeed the world is made up of social hierarchies and superiority of certain individuals.

In the second paragraph, instead, he makes examples to clarify that we need to find common aspects with other people and not differences in order to be a global citizen. Changez seeks a sense of belonging, a tie with America, common aspects with the local population in order to integrate himself into that new world. Indeed the protagonist tries apparently to convince the stranger on his feeling at home in Manhattan, a synecdoche for New York. When the protagonist found himself to live in New York, he tried to overcome a sense of nostalgia through his senses. Everything reminds him about his mother land: Urdu, his mother tongue, is spoken even in America and typical Pakistani food can be tasted at the Pak-Punjab Deli, to conclude with his memory of a song “which I had danced at my cousin’s wedding”. So he seeks affinity with the foreign country to survive, mentions elements that he perceives through the senses and that reminds him about Pakistan.

To conclude all the elements that Changez mentions trying to convince the stranger, allow him to remember the past; however, the American people’s mentality before and after the Twin Towers attack changes. Indeed at first there were apparent similarities/differences between the two cultures, subsequently the confidence that Changez had placed in this nation, as a globalized nation with an open mind, is definitively betrayed. However, it was his responsibility to believe in it and so he should have expected the consequences. American people accept foreigners only if they want to.

In addition the writer uses a change of point of view highlighting the presence of a round character, Change himself, who shows his evolution during the course of the story; on the other hand, the writer describes a flat character, who doesn’t have any radical evolution or change in the novel: he is the stranger that can represent the point of view of any western reader who attends the dramatic monologue of a Eastern man. Indeed the stranger is not even defined, he doesn’t have a proper name but the reader knows about his presence thanks to the clues given by the speaker.