"The Reluctant Fundamentalist": Where the Observer Becomes a Participant
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the years following 9/11 through the eyes of Changez, a Pakistani who is living in New York, and the impact it has on the way he is treated.
From the title page to the closing lines, Hamid succeeds in creating a novel that drags the reader from being a keen observer to a (reluctant) participant.
Many books simply tell a story, they create a world that can be explored only through the experiences and minds of the characters on the pages. However, The Reluctant Fundamentalist allows the reader to become a part of that journey—the way in which each reader experiences the novel depends on their own fundamentalism.
In an article for The Guardian, Hamid writes that “make-believe storytelling, which is to say fiction, wasn't exclusively about being an observer”. Fiction is also about embracing the innocence of youth that allows the reader to live fiction, as they once did as children, through participation with the words on the page as if they were a physical thing.
By using second person narrative, Hamid is asking the reader to engage with Changez; if the reader is being directly addressed they will begin to draw their own opinions on the protagonist of the story based on their honest reactions to the way that he acts and thinks. If they were experiencing the character though the perspective of another, the perception that the reader has of Changez would be different because their opinions would be influenced by the text.
As Hamid wrote in his article: “how feelings already present inside a reader – fear, anger, suspicion, loyalty – could colour a narrative so that the reader, as much as or even more than the writer, is deciding what is really going on.” That is to say that the reader is encouraged to allow their own preconceived opinions to guide the way in which they read the text and react to the characters. Reluctantly, or otherwise, readers become fundamentalists in the novel, because their beliefs and views are what construct it.
The title of the novel is a description of the reader; it is description of the journey that they are about to take—where the reader is left to the devices of their own mind and, in many cases, forced to consider their own stance in the political topic at hand. Similarly, the ending of the novel is left open to the interpretation of the reader, who has been taken on a thrilling journey by Hamid into the mind of Changez (himself a reluctant fundamentalist in the Americanism sense of the word), only to be left to conclude the novel in their own way: as a participant and not an observer.
The beautiful thing about this novel is that it can be read in so many different ways. The way I interpret the text will be different to anyone else, which in turn creates a piece of art that encourages and entertains endless hours of discussion and debate.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a lesson by Hamid about the use of second person narrative in making the observer an active participant: “to let readers see how they are reading, and, therefore, how they are living and how they are deciding their politics” (Hamid, The Guardian).
Works Cited
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/22/mohsin-hamid-second-person-narrative
