Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life: Many of the most contentious debates right now center on whether we, as individuals - and as a country - are willing to revise. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He begins to tell the story of a man named Changez, who is living an immigrant’s dream of America. Therefore, this research argues that Hamid’s novel attempts to delineate the discourses of Islamophobia, capitalism, economic and political domination of the west, and fundamentalism in context of 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.The elegant and compelling novel about a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York-an extraordinary portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world in America post-9/11.Īt a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger.
In Hamid’s novel the “Other” is directly represented, not through the Orientalist discourse, but through an Easterner who changes his allegiance from a believer in and proponent of the neoliberal capitalist version of the American Dream to a skeptic and opponent of USA economic and political foreign policy. This is exactly where the importance of Mohsin Hamid’ novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), is manifested to challenge and subvert the dominant post-9/11 discourse. The Bush Doctrine, however, represented terrorism as a cause rather than an effect of the long history of Western colonization, oppression and manipulation of the Muslim World. Therefore, another version of America initiates fueled by post-9/11 xenophobia and President Bush administration’s “war on terror” launched on the pretext of promoting democracy. After the events of 9/11, the idealized notion of the melting pot was abandoned. America was founded on the idea of the melting pot that guarantees success, an opportunity to prosperity and social upward regardless of race, religion or status at birth.
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