The article will focus on the different impulses of solitude and exile in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid that Changez, central character and narrator, crosses into the United States of America while working as an employee at a company called Underwood Samson and his subsequent return to Pakistan, his native country where he claims to appear extremely nationalist. This is to argue that Changez's desperate attempt to take this position has its cultural roots in the cultural alienation and racism he is subjected to while in America and his futility to fit in naturally in the way of 'a Pakistani. This essay will show how Changez's analysis of American corporate fundamentalism stems from his lack of a sense of belonging to a foreign culture and a sense of displaced identity. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid is a perfect illustration of how an author can create an inevitable situation of artistic fear and verbal control. It is also a laudable example of how an endless tension between identical polarities of understanding and alienation can perpetuate itself through the pages by altering the narrative voice in terms of tone, texture, and reliability. The literary work is exclusively occupied by the moving voice of Changez, its storyteller and main character. The enchanting openness of her personality and the fresh charm of her appearance ensure a fascinating one-sided exchange. His monologue begins with an appropriate and seemingly kind offer to help an American, who slowly settles into the role of a silent speaker and whose ethnicity is taken into account in the novel's first three lines: "Excuse- me, sir. , but can I be of help? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Don't be scared by my beard: I'm a lover of America. » A set of conventions, which involve prevalent racial stereotypes in a post-9/11 world, are ignored in the space of a few sentences. Changez rightly recognizes the man as American by his “look,” not by the color of his skin or his sartorial inclinations. It seems to Changez that the latter is on a “mission”. These two words – “scope” and “mission” – take on powerful nationalist implications as the novel progresses. Changez meets the American stranger at a teahouse in Lahore and takes him on a fabulous journey into Changez's past and tells him about his time at Princeton, his profession at Underwood Samson, his trip with associates to Greece , of his love affair with Erica, of Chris, Erica's deceased common-law, his ultimate disappointment with his career and America in general, his return to Pakistan and his success as a university professor and strict promoter of America's disinterest. The themes of integration and exile constitute the root of the novel. From the outset of his familiarity with America, Changez's desire to assimilate into America is evident, but this ambition is linked to an idiosyncratic motivation to stand out—to visibly proclaim his attitude with an air of official propriety . He reports with composure: “At Princeton, I behaved in public like a young prince, generous and carefree.” Furthermore, he states with a certain amount of pride and vanity: “I have never, to my knowledge, been afraid of solitude.” His happiness at having been accepted by the people of Princeton is expressed in this sentence: "Most of the people I met were seduced by my public persona." These attributeschanges within him and the rest of the novel tells the story of Changez's increasing loneliness in a number of areas of life. To begin with, Changez's history clearly shows that he is hardworking, chivalrous and generally recognized. He, as a narrator, may not be reliable. Through his voice alone, we are forced to pay attention. By telling the American about his interview with Underwood Samson, he creates a slightly hubristic deviation. The fact that Changez tells his story in real time makes it more compelling. There is a relentless parallelism between the actions currently taking place in the Lahore teahouse and the past of Changez's America, giving the storyline a sense of unified eternity. Moreover, the peculiar way in which Changez describes the city of Lahore, with the imprecise entrances and separations of anonymous and unidentified characters, is charming and also expresses his knowledge of the place in detail. description of America, with the probable exception of New York – a city with which he still seems nostalgically associated. His excitement about getting a job at Underwood Samson and the freedom and economic madness it offers is complemented by an awkward feeling of cultural dislocation: "On a subway car, my skin is usually in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists asked me for directions. In four and a half years, I have never been American; I was immediately a New Yorker” (33). Furthermore, this soon leads to dissatisfaction with the glaring dissimilarity in scientific and industrial progress between America and Pakistan, leading him to recall, with a certain degree of emotional nostalgia, the country's past splendors. country which would be Pakistan. Ironically, the primordial civilization of the Indus Valley is forced to compete with modern America: often during my stay in your country, such comparisons have troubled me. In fact, they did more than bother me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we people of the Indus Basin had cities laid out on grids and with underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians . Today, our cities were largely unplanned and unsanitary, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national education budget. There is undoubtedly no reason to believe that the modern populations of Lahore are the same people who once occupied the Indus Basin. '. Changez then adopts a broad vision and attempts to forge an invented identity. Also opposed to what he gradually identifies as the encroaching supremacy of American neo-imperialism, he must associate himself with the alternative norm in order to be able to stand up to it. The disconnections that occur between assimilation and isolation in the essence of Changez are as follows: Changez is therefore not only a victim of one national identity, but of multiple and conflicting identities. As he goes through life, when he moves, he cannot help but see himself as a member of a certain “we” – but he cannot, for that reason, seem to settle down. on a “we” to adopt, or even on a coherent whole. two. He is, at different points in the novel, a Third Worlder, a Muslim, a Pakistani, a member of the Indus Basin Civilization, a New Yorker, and a Princetonian. Changez may not be afraid of isolation, as he claims, however. he is probably not comfortable with this, powerless as he is to move forward in life alone. While employed at Underwood Samson, he gains gratitude and is generally valuable. However, it seems to be morefurther alienated from the way the company operated and the fundamental principles on which his point of view was based. Perhaps he begins to discover the hidden qualities of colonialism in Underwood Samson and attempts to free himself from them. So when he says, “I could, if I wanted to, take my colleagues out for drinks after work – an activity classified as “new hire culture” – and spend with impunity in an hour more than my father won in one day! ", he does it not only with childish excitement, but also with a slight feeling of repentance. At the same time, the cultural boundary widens further when he embarks on an adventure in Manila where he discovers himself torn between the desire to be observed by the Filipinos as one of the "members of the officer class of the world trade” and the refusal to do so. he regularly tells Philippine authorities of his father's age: "I need it now." He is not accepted as either an American or an Asian, which leads him to think about the differences in how polite speech is addressed to an elderly person, in English as in Urdu. Additionally, Changez's sense of loneliness and exile was heightened due to the American "invasion" of Afghanistan at the end of October of the same year. Above all, he is elusive, “preferring not to watch the partisan and sports event coverage given to the discrepancy between American bombers with their 21st century weapons and the poorly equipped and poorly fed Afghan tribesmen.” His escape suggests his reluctance to take a stand on this political event. In a deeper sense, he expresses his distress at having to choose between America and Afghanistan – a country he compassionately calls "Pakistan's neighbor, our friend and a Muslim nation." At this point, he begins to dismantle the American side of his individuality. Anger accelerates the progression of Changez's dismantling of American identity, and this procedure ends with a response to the events of September 11 that shocks Changez as much as it surprises the reader. This reaction distances Changez from the reader's point of view, particularly from the American reader's point of view. This climactic passage is worth quoting in its entirety: The following evening was supposed to be our last in Manila. I was in my room, packing my things. I turned on the television and saw what I initially thought was a movie. But as I continued to watch, I realized that this was not fiction but current events. I watched one – then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapse. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my first reaction was to be remarkably satisfied. Furthermore, the important point here is the frankness and frankness with which he speaks to an American listener. He refers to his own surprise at the idea of ​​being “pleased”: “So when I tell you that I was happy with the massacre of thousands of innocents, I do it with a deep feeling of perplexity.” However, he soon states that he returned to depicting the incident – ​​his desire stemming from the idea that "someone had so visibly brought America to its knees". The inability to detach reality from the representative is an additional attribute that personifies Changez's inner feelings. Nevertheless, the writer shapes the story at this level in such a way that the reader, even if he has lost all compassion for Changez, does not find him unreliable as a character. Additionally, around the time of the disastrous 9/11, his affiliation with Erica also changes. To an excessive degree, Changez feels fascinated by Erica due to her subtlety, density, and subtle opposition. The evil ofcountry, which they both feel, offers them an unconscious basis for a common identification which ultimately leads to an acquaintance, but it is precisely the desire which ends any possibility of an unshakable relationship. Both Erica and Changez are trapped in their personal pasts. Changez states that he matured "with the feeling of nostalgia of a poor boy" and that the refuge offered by solitude can be seen as an elicitation of "imaginary memories" to which he had perceived some of his parents adhering while he was a budding student. Remembering, Changez says: “Nostalgia was their crack, if you will, and my childhood was riddled with the consequences of their addiction…”. Changez and Erica's early difficulties in having sex symbolically show Changez's powerlessness to "penetrate" a foreign culture that is not his own and an enigmatic past in which Erica is imprisoned. His desirability towards him results in part from his amiable demeanor and his unique and glamorous character. For him it embodies everything that is past, detached, isolated, splendid and finally exiled. Nevertheless, there is a wall that divides them because of the difference in their cultural upbringings and the difference in their own private lives of solitude. As the novel progresses, Changez is increasingly drawn to the feeling of the country to which he belongs. Additionally, Erica is gradually troubled by reminiscences of her deceased lover, Chris. It is the opposing impulses that isolate them. Erica discovered or at least had difficulty discovering Chris in Changez. The fact is that Changez was looking for “Am-erica” in Erica. It is not only Changez whose idea is handicapped by loneliness, but perhaps Erica's too, in relation to her fall, is extremely symbolic and revealing. The gradual end of their affiliation suggests the collapse between the two cultures. Erica's romantic identification with Chris increases as the novel progresses, and she yearns for him with a passion that borders on a serious sense of loneliness. For this reason, her difficulty interacting with the outside world increases and she sinks into unhappiness. Unfortunately, Changez discovers her cold and insensitive. Chris' death caused the disappearance of her sexuality: “Her sexuality,” she said, “had been mostly dormant since his death. She had reached orgasm only once, and that too while fantasizing about him. She strives to compensate for the lack of sexuality with energetic creative activity. Even Erica's document for her novel provides no indication of her situation, and Changez is unable to "locate Erica in the rhythms or sounds of what she had written." Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a custom paper now from our expert writers.Get a custom essayErica is dressed in Chris's shirt while vacationing in Greece, on the beach and this imagery is unmistakable. She refuses to believe that Chris is dead and therefore feels the continual urge to metaphorically revive him. She transforms into Chris and in this transformation she herself is incorporated: "Suffice it to say that their love was an unusual love, with such a degree of mixing of identities that when Chris died, Erica felt that 'she was lost; even now, she says, she doesn't know if she can be found. In Erica's opinion, Chris was "a handsome boy with what she described as Old World appeal." Thus, it is very obvious why Changez comes to momentarily occupy the void created by Chris' disappearance in Erica's life. Changez, whose belief in the "fundamentals" of Underwood Samson has gradually faded, finds himself twice alienated from the idea of ​​playing the.