The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mohsin Hamid's Narrative Technique

Mohsin Hamid writes in an interview with The Guardian about his writing process. "If the novel was special because it allowed writers and readers to create jointly, to dance together, then it seemed to me that I should try to write novels that maximised this possibility of opening themselves up to being read in different ways, to involving the reader as a kind of character, indeed as a kind of co-writer." In his first novel, Moth Smoke, this interaction between reader and author takes place in the form of the reader judging the evidence presented about the protagonist. In his third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the narrative is told in the second person, describing entirely the actions of "You." In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the reader takes the position of the silent American stranger who is never heard from. Since the entire novel takes the form of a dramatic monologue told by Changez, it would seem that it might exclude the reader, but since Changez makes so many observations about his listener's reactions and guesses his thoughts, the reader must not only deal with the character of Changez but also with the projection, or preemption, of him or herself that Hamid creates through Changez. Moreover, without any omniscient narrator, the reader is left with uncertainty as to what the truth is in the story.