Conflicted Identities in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" and "Terrorist" Mr Lewis Bedford 12th Grade

At the table of an unassuming cafe in Old Anarkali market, Lahore, Changez relates the story of his citizenship within America and charts the nature of his stay. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid is able to successfully employ a rare style of dramatic monologue which allows Changez to create all of the narrative, without any permeation or interruption from the ‘American’ who remains deliberately covert to enhance the storyline’s mystique. Hamid uses both structural and linguistic techniques to explore the theme of conflicting identity. In fact, both within Hamid's novel and within another novel of displacement, John Updike's Terrorist, there are several characters who appear to express opacity in terms of their true identities.

Changez’s friend and failed lover Erica seems to lack any genuine conviction to redevelop her identity after the loss of Chris, her late boyfriend. Changez claims that she became dangerously introspective, stating ‘Her eyes turned inward,… she was struggling against a current that puled her within herself,’. The repetition of ‘her’ creates a centralized image of self-entrapment. Culture is an important pointer regarding where an individual possesses a certain identity, for example Changez...