The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com The Reluctant Fundamentalist Migration to the North is another major influence: it tells the INTRODUCTION story of a Middle Eastern man who travels to the West, is fetishized for his exotic otherness, and eventually leaves his BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF MOHSIN HAMID adopted home. The Reluctant Fundamentalist also bears a Mohsin Hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his noticeable resemblance to the frame narrative of The Arabian childhood in Palo Alto, California, while his father pursued a Nights, in which Scheherazade prolongs her life by telling her PhD at Stanford University. After the age of nine, Hamid executor lengthy, tangential stories. returned to Pakistan with his family and attended Aitchison College, a highly prestigious boarding school founded in the KEY FACTS late 19th century. At the age of 18, he attended Princeton University, where he studied with the famous writers Toni • Full Title: The Reluctant Fundamentalist Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, and graduated summa cum • When Written: 2001-2006 laude (with highest honors). He attended Harvard Law School, • Where Written: London and Lahore but found it boring. In his spare time, he worked on a novel he had begun writing as an undergraduate at Princeton; in 2000, • When Published: 2007 he published this work, Moth Smoke. Moth Smoke was a success • Literary Period: Post-modernism in the United States and a huge hit in Pakistan (it was even • Genre: Bildungsroman adapted as a TV miniseries), enabling Hamid to devote himself • Setting: Lahore and New York City to writing full-time. He didn't complete another novel until • Climax: Changez and the Stranger's confrontation (which 2007, when he published The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which may not be a confrontation at all) outside the Stranger's reflects his xperiencese at Princeton. His third and most recent hotel novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, was released in 2013. • Antagonist: Underwood Samson, the United States, possibly Hamid writes for dozens of magazines, journals, and the Stranger newspapers, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, • Point of View: First person monologue (Changez) and the Paris Review. As of May 2015, he is rumored to be working on his fourth novel. EXTRA CREDIT HISTORICAL CONTEXT A new point of view. Hamid experiments with unusual points of view in his writing. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is written as a The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the world, particularly dramatic monologue, and his subsequent novel, How to Get the United States and Pakistan, during the late 90s and early Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is one of the few English-language 2000s. The single most important historical event in the novel novels written in the second person! is the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. 2001: Hamid shows how the events of this day inspired the War on Terror in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, as well as Hamid in Hollywood. In 2012, The Reluctant Fundamentalist the impact of that act on the social world of the United States. was adapted into a film yb the acclaimed director Mira Nair. The India-Pakistan Standoff of 2001-2002, which makes Changez fear for his family’s safety, is another important event in the novel. Finally, Hamid alludes to the early 2000s PLOT SUMMARY recession, which coincided with the dot-com bubble “bursting,” In the streets of Lahore, Pakistan, a young man, Changez, and led to increased unemployment around the world. approaches an unnamed man (for the purposes of his summary, we'll call him the Stranger), and asks, in an unclear combination RELATED LITERARY WORKS of extreme politeness and menacing familiarity, if he can be of In interviews, Hamid has cited several important influences on assistance. Changez says that the Stranger looks American, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Like Hamid’s novel, Albert escorts him to a nearby cafe, where they drink tea and eat Camus’s novel, The Fall, published in 1957, about a man whose dinner. As afternoon turns into evening, Changez tells the fortunes rise and fall in Paris, consists of dramatic monologues, Stranger about his time in the United States. with the protagonist recalling his life and occasionally Changez comes from a respected but declining Pakistani family. interrogating his audience. Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Nonetheless, he gets into and attends Princeton University, ©2020 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com Page 1 Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com where he makes excellent grades and acts the part of an exotic encourages violence. foreigner, but secretly works multiple jobs to support himself As Changez tells the Stranger his story, he frequently points and his family. He comments to the Stranger that he now sees out that the Stranger seems uncomfortable, and notes that the that Princeton was indoctrinating him into a pro-American Stranger has something under his jacket in the exact position mindset—teaching him to use his skills to help American where spies keep a gun. The waiter who serves them their food companies—but that he didn’t realize this at the time. Near the seems angry with the Stranger, but Changez assures the end of his senior year, he interviews for a prestigious valuing Stranger that there is no danger. Changez then walks the firm, Underwood Samson, which does analysis to determine Stranger back to his hotel. As they stand outside, the Stranger the worth of companies. During his interview, Jim, an executive notices a group of people, including the waiter, who've been vice president at the firm, learns that Changez is on financial following them, and reaches under his jacket. aid, and conceals his economic status from his classmates; Jim tells Changez that he, too, hid his background at Princeton, and gives him a job. Between graduating Princeton and beginning CHARACTERS his career at Underwood Samson, Changez goes on a vacation to Greece with Princeton friends and peers. It is here that he MAJOR CHARACTERS meets Erica, a beautiful and charismatic Princeton graduate, Changez – Changez, the protagonist of the novel, is a Pakistani with whom he is instantly smitten. man who went to college in Princeton, and who narrates the In New York, Changez begins his career at Underwood Samson. story of his time in the United States to the Stranger. For most He makes friends with another trainee, Wainwright, and wins of the novel, he loves the United States and works hard to be the admiration of his colleagues and supervisors. Meanwhile, accepted by his American friends and colleagues while working he continues to spend time with Erica, who lives in New York at a New York financial firm.et, Y after 9/11 changes his and invites him to parties and dinners. Changez notices that perspective and he faces increasing racism and discrimination, Erica seems deeply lonely, even when she's surrounded by and as his relationship with the beautiful American Erica is friends, and learns that her boyfriend and childhood friend, thwarted by Erica’s obsession with her dead former boyfriend Chris, died last year. Chris, he eventually becomes disillusioned with his adopted While working in Manila, in the Philippines, Changez witnesses country, viewing it as a danger to the rest of the world. Changez the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and then leaves America and returns to Pakistan, where he finds himself feeling pleasure at the sight of powerful, arrogant becomes an anti-US lecturer. Throughout Changez’s narration America brought to its knees. Then, on his return flight to New he sometimes addresses the Stranger directly, and these York, he is detained at the airport. He begins to notice and be interactions are never entirely clear; Changez’s tone hovers the subject of increasing racism and discrimination in New York between concern, politeness, and care, and a kind of over- City and at Underwood Samson. Erica, traumatized by 9/11, solicitous menace (which one might also say accurately begins to sink into nostalgia for Chris. One night, Changez and describes his feelings for the US at this point of his life). Erica have sex, a “success” Changez achieves partly by telling Ultimately, though, the novel ends without revealing whether Erica to pretend that he is Chris. Changez thinks this will bring or not Changez can be trusted, both as a narrator and as a them closer, but Erica grows increasingly distant from friend to the Stranger, whether Changez has come to his anti- Changez. US views while still to an extent loving America, or whether he has become a terrorist. There is a sense in the cliffhanger Changez, feeling increasingly uncomfortable in New York and ending, which seems poised on a knife’s edge between the United States as a foreigner after 9/11, travels to Pakistan cementing a friendship between Changez and the Stranger or to see his family, and feels angry with the United States for descending into violence, that Changez is in that moment supporting India's aggression against his home. At the same choosing his own path. time, he doesn’t feel entirely Pakistani, either. Later, while traveling to Chile for Underwood Samson, he meets Juan- The Stranger – The unnamed person to whom Changez Batista, the president of a publishing company, who compares recounts his time in America, the Stranger never speaks in the Changez to a janissary — a reference to Crusades era warriors book. In fact, the reader’s only impressions of him come from who were kidnapped from their own culture, and then forced Changez’s remarks. Because of this, it’s left unclear how much to fight against it.

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