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

   The narrator’s fictional choice is to resort to the dramatic monologue as the most suitable means to silence the stranger, his interlocutor, with the clear aim to bring to surface an Easter 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 similarities/differences , between Manhattan and Lahore new districts. This is done on purpose: Changez sounds ironical when he compares Manhattan to the new parts of Lahore. You can realise it in the use of the exclamation mark: “like Manhattan? Yes, precisely!” The stranger might feel rather surprise in front of the comparison, since the speaker has just expressed a personal, social and political point of view relying an urban as well as a social divide comparison. Indeed, the divide- a social one- has been anticipated by the contrast sending back to “an ancient hierarchy” that juxtaposing “the mounting men” and “the men of foot” bring to focus the opposition poor vs rich. The intelligent reader immediately perceives the poor correspond to Pakistan, while the rich recalls well-off 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 hid feeling at home in Manhattan, a synecdoche for New York, when he reminds him that Urdu, his mother tongue, could be heard in New York as well as the typical Pakistani food could be tasted at the Pak-Punjab Dehli, to conclude with his memory of a song “which I have danced at my cousin’s wedding”.

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 shock are suitable to implicit emotionally highlight a cultural difference which he managed to overcome intellectually.

Anyway there are a cultural divide between Western and Eastern people.

To conclude between cultures there are similarities and differences, but not for this reason one is better than another; moreover, in my opinion, world is beautiful because is different, indeed if it would be all the same, it will be boring.

We mustn’t escape from what is different from us and mostly we don’t have fear of it.