A Transnational Reading of America: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist communicates a transnational consciousness that constitutes his critique of the universal narrative of Western modernity and American exceptionalism, the novelistic representation of which is enabled by employing its unconventional narrative structure. This paper examines how the novel’s thematic concerns with Western modernity and American exceptionalism interact specifically with Hamid’s choice of narrative voice: the story is conveyed solely by the Pakistani narrator, Changez, without direct narration by the American interlocutor listening to him in a cafe in Lahore. In a broader sense, the paper argues that Hamid’s narrative strategy interrogates the issue of perspective and challenges the single-track way of knowing, i.e., the Euro-American-centric monolithic modes of knowledge production since the period of the Enlightenment.