In this text I am going to analyse an extract taken from chapter three from The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel by Mohsin Hamid. The sequence deals with the scene where the protagonist – narrator is telling the interlocutor about the new districts of Lahore, while they are having a cup of tea in the city.

Silencing the Stranger (the interlocutor), is the aim of the narrator: he achieves that by resorting to the dramatic monologue. This technique allows the writer to bring to surface an Eastern perspective on events such as the World Trade Center attack and the way America preserved its relationships with other countries after 9/11.

Changez, a Pakistani young man, is the protagonist and the speaking voice. In the extract, he is inviting the Stranger to look around while he is presenting the city, but Changez is actually being ironical: he wants to draw the Stranger’s attention on the similarities/differences between Manhattan and Lahore’s new districts. The irony in this passage in underlined by the use of the exclamation mark: “like Manhattan? Yes, precisely!”. Moreover, Changez wants to point out the difference between those who go around the city by car or on foot, indicating “the superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot”. Those who can afford to buy a car are the wealthy and they represent well-off Manhattan, whereas Pakistan corresponds to the poor ones who cannot afford to buy a car and are forced to go around always on foot. Thanks to this example, Mohsin Hamid is able to present a binary system where people are divided based on their socio-economic status, thus indicating the superiority of certain individuals.

The dichotomy is present in every lexical choice of the extract. For example, when Changez tries to convince the Stranger that he feels at home in Manhattan, the wealthiest part of New York: when he reminds him that Urdu, him mother language could be heard in New York, when he says that the typical Pakistani food could be tasted during Punjab Day, or when he recalls his memory of a song “which I have danced at my brother’s wedding”. In this case irony is used as a defence weapon by means of which when Changez finds himself to live in the USA he tries to overcome a sense of nostalgia through his senses. This means he survived the cultural shock intellectually overcoming it.

The unconscious stubbornness, at the beginning, to find common aspects in the Pakistani and American culture is an expression of his desire to feel valued in the USA, where he was accepted only because he was brilliant. After 9/11 America rejected anybody who was not western, while taking patriotism to the extreme. Thus, any similarity that Changez thought he had found vanished. He was not considered as a person anymore, he was only a Pakistani man who was a possible threat, in the eyes of America.

Mohsin Hamid presents only the point of view of the Eastern world on the theme of migrants’ integration, silencing the West. Indeed, Changez is the one who has a name and a complete characterisation, while the Stranger is only known as an American man, being a flat character. Changez’s round character shows an evolution which allows the reader to understand how Easter people’s perception of America changed after the World Trade Center attack: rejection and racism made Changez lose his faith in the USA’s values.