Silencing the American: A Limitation or Success? Aaisha Mumtaz College

Following a tradition in anything is easy. The pattern is set, the style defined. Only your originality is required and there you go with the flow. But it is certainly very difficult to go against the main current, challenging traditional stock and daring to create your own methods and ways. You risk it all. You are never sure of what might follow as your reward of changing the track, never certain about how the world might react to the shift. But that’s the dare!

Mohsin Hamid, in his famous novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, turns out to be daring enough as to build a separate track for himself to walk on. He chooses a method which is uncanny in the world of writing, giving the one-sided perspective of his Pakistani protagonist while skillfully holding back the reactions of an interlocutor, the American. He seems to have had a lot in mind before daring to forward his work for publication and we can observe that this silencing of the American (read "America") becomes the strength of the novel rather than a limitation as any traditional, stereotypical writer would have assumed.

Whatever reasons Hamid had in his mind for this silencing of the American, the readers feel a sense of satisfaction in the first place. This urge to be...