With this text I'm going to analyze an extract from the third chapter of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, of Mohsin Hamid.

The narrator's choice of using the dramatic monologue as the most suitable narrative tecnique is a way to silence the Stranger, his interlocutor in order to put in evidence a different point of view: Easter one, about the Twin Tower attack and the relationship between America and Pakistan.

Changez, by addressing to the Stranger, makes a comparison between his native city, Lahore, and New York. He highlights the huge gap displayed in the society: men who afford cars and men on foot. To put it another way, the opposition between rich and poor characterizes the reality of the newer districts of Lahore, that are ironically associated to Manhattan in order to emphasize his sense of apparent affinity. Actually, the poor is represented by Pakistan, whereas the rich symbolizes America.

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.

The extract brings to surface how the intelligent reader can understand the ambiguity of Manhattan/Lahore descriptions. You can immediately note how the poor corresponds to Pakistan while the rich recollects America, especially Manhattan.