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One is Erica, whose name even seems to originate from (Am)erica. On p. 114-115 of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Erica is explicitly compared to America. Changez says, “it seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time.” Is Erica meant to be a stand-in for America throughout the novel?
In The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Pakistani narrator Changez extensively gives an account of his years spent in America and what led him to move back to Lahore. He speaks to a nameless American visitor, whose responses are only made known to the reader through Changez’s reactions to them.
Changez’s (hi)story is not that of Erica. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is therefore not only a story about an unrequited love affair but on a broader level, a tale of communication breakdown which makes us interrogate the structures that govern our lives and separate us from the people who might be different from us in terms of culture.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ s nuanced treatment of Erica parallels its presentation of America as endlessly attractive and self-absorbed rather than willfully destructive of self or others. Hamid, who has lived in London since August 2001, admits that he was somewhat surprised by the following his novel developed in the US.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a fictional novel about Changez, a Pakistani man who undergoes ideological and political changes as he studies and works in America. Living in New York City at the time of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Changez discovers that he no longer wishes to pursue the American Dream and instead finds his.
FUNDAMENTALIST. An immediately notable feature of Mira Nair’s 2012 adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is that the film concretely resolves the identities held in provocative suspension by the novel. The book’s narrator, Changez, possibly a Pakistani terrorist, confronts a silent and unnamed American visitor who may be a CIA operative, though neither.