THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST – EXTRACT FROM PAGES 36/37 (ANALYSIS)

The present text is meant to analyse an extract taken from Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, chapter 3. The sequence considers the moment when the protagonist is telling the American interlocutor about the new districts of Lahore.

Narration is based on a technique that according to novelist is the most suitable means to silence the Stranger, the interlocutor, so as to point out an Eastern perspective concerning the World Trade Centre attack and the global relationship America and the alter-world shared in the act of terror aftermath.

Indeed the speaking voice is Changez, a Pakistani young man who compares Manhattan to Lahore’s new districts by means of irony, a useful figure of speech for narrator to draw the Stranger’s attention on the two cities’ differences (false similarities). The contrast is forestalled by sending back to ancient hierarchies: juxtaposing a “mounted man” and a “man on foot” the main character remarks the divide “poor and rich”: the former standing for Pakistan, the latter for the better-off Manhattan.

A foreigner’s first issue regards settling in the new reality and he/she is undoubtedly compelled to seek for any alike-to-homeland elements in order to feel at ease. Changez managed to overcome homesickness through intellectual endeavour: this is an effective way both to survive and to highlight the great gap dividing East and West.