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The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Mohsin Hamid. Q: The Reluctant Fundamentalist cleverly taps into the reader’s own prejudices about the word ‘fundamentalist’. Were you trying to demonstrate how engrained these prejudices are today?.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist MohsinHamid
Q: The Reluctant Fundamentalist cleverly taps into the reader’s ownprejudices about the word ‘fundamentalist’. Were you trying todemonstrate how engrained these prejudices are today? A: The novel is just a conversation between two men, one of whom we never hear, and yet many people have said it feels like a thriller. The reason for that is we are already afraid. We have been led to believe that we live in a world where terrorism is as likely to kill us as cancer or cholesterol, where the ability to engage in dispassionate, impersonal, politically-motivated homicide is not an aberration but rather natural. We have been encouraged to lose a sense of perspective. And so the fear provoked by the novel is within us. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a dramatic monologue, in other words a half-conversation, a half story. The reader is asked to provide the other half of the novel’s meaning. And in so doing, by co-creating the novel, readers have an experience of themselves. Or at least that is my hope, to contain within the fascination and seduction of a fast-paced and emotionally powerful story the fascination and seduction of a strange-shaped and oddly reflective mirror. (Booker Prize Foundation interview with MohsinHamid on tapping into the reader’s imagination, September, 2007)
What is Hamid saying about: Our society? His novel?
Hamid states that we are: Afraid (to the point of prejudice & paranoia?) Desensitised to the genocide of civilians during war (able to justify it or even ignore it in order to protect our own) faced with our own prejudices and beliefs when reading the novel as our own views impact on our interpretation.
“People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself” -Hamid
“The political positions of both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush are founded on failures of empathy, failures of compassion toward people who seem different” - Hamid Is it possible that at the end of the book the two men come to some understanding or at least tolerance of each other and that therefore there is no dramatic, violent ending to the novel? Or alternatively, perhaps they still do not understand each other but they are not out to harm each other either. What might be Hamid’s purpose or message if we were to interpret the text this way?
Question Attack ‘The ending of the novel is an unsatisfactory conclusion for the reader.’ Do you agree?
