Framing travel and terrorism: Allegory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

In contrast to others who have read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist exclusively as a political novel, I argue that the novel’s most significant contribution to the body of post-9/11 literature is formal in nature. The novel indeed mobilizes political issues, but it achieves this by creating a series of allegories that centre on various forms of travel connected to the terrorism hinted at in the term “fundamentalist” in the title. These allegories, which I examine in the first part of this article, revolve around the interactions between the protagonist and those he encounters as he travels: the hosts and guests in the travel interactions function as allegories of different nations, and the relationships between nations within global space. However, while the novel’s travel allegories indeed raise political concerns, these are often conflicted and ambiguous owing to the unreliability of the narrator. Rather than selecting one of the unreliable perspectives brought forth by the travel allegories as “true”, I read them as part of a larger meta-allegorical project in which the narrative itself becomes an allegory of the uncertainties of the post-9/11 environment. In the second part of this article, I discuss this meta-allegorical project through an examination of the novel’s narrative structure, particularly its frame narrative which, I argue, provides a means for Hamid to allegorically explore the ways that permeable borders engender paranoia and fear of terrorism in the post-9/11 context.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is a novel that announces from its very title that it is part of the surge in post-9/11 literary products associated with the nations, cultures, languages, and faiths of Islam, a trend that for Anna Ball indicates a liberal fascination that “is the flip-side of both Islamaphobia and Islamic discontent” (2008: 309). It does so by using the term “fundamentalist” to manipulate assumptions about its own status as exotic literary artefact, as well as post-9/11 stereotypes about terrorism: the fact that the novel is written by a Pakistani novelist draws on the obdurate associations between Islamic nations, fundamentalism, and violence to imply that this must be a novel about terrorism. In fact, though, it turns out that the term “fundamentalist” is used to describe the ethos of Underwood Samson, the New York-based financial firm that hires the Pakistani protagonist, Changez: “Focus on the fundamentals. This was Underwood Samson’s guiding principle, drilled into us since our first day at work. It mandated a single-minded attention to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value” (2007: 98; emphasis in original). The term “fundamentalist”, then, becomes problematized. If the title lures prospective readers into expecting the protagonist to be a terrorist (albeit a reluctant one), the novel goes on to unsettle that insinuation by aligning fundamentalism with transnational corporatism. “Fundamentalist” becomes a term that may refer to the protagonist’s politics, but equally may refer to an economic mode of domination that is responsible for the vast inequalities within the globalized world.

This kind of shifting, ambiguous meaning is typical of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In this article, I argue that this is not a text about a character who is a “reluctant” participant in fundamentalist activity, regardless of whether fundamentalism is defined as a feature of terrorism or capitalism; it is a text about the ways in which the narrator who tells Changez’s story manipulates terminologies, discourses, and ideologies. This textual project is intimately bound up with the text’s narrative structure. The story of Changez’s life — his immigration to America as an international student, his employment by Underwood Samson, his participation in the elite strata of New York society and, following 9/11, his disenchantment with America — is told by Changez himself to a silent American tourist who listens to his story over a dinner table in Lahore, Pakistan. The exchange between tourist and Pakistani host is encased in a frame narrative that surrounds the main narrative (the story the narrator tells of Changez’s life to the American tourist). The effect of this narrative structure is that the veracity of the novel’s bildungsroman tale is unsettled: every word in the novel is uttered by Changez-the-narrator (who I will call “the narrator”), and consequently there is no way to ascertain the truth of the story he tells about Changez-the-character (who I will call “Changez”). Rather than presenting a unified narrative about Changez’s relationship with America, the narrator slides between discourses and frames of reference as he constructs Changez as a victim of colonialism, postcolonial politics, globalization, neoliberalism, and American imperialism. I will explore the narrator’s manipulation of these discourses below, but for now suffice to say that Changez is a malleable figure who, at the behest of the narrator, traverses a complex globalized world in which historical and contemporary global crosscurrents converge in surprising ways. While he may in one way be regarded as a postcolonial victim of globalization (and is certainly portrayed at times by the narrator as such), he is also a beneficiary of neoliberal globalization and its deracialization of success. Through his construction of Changez-the-character, Changez-the-narrator explores the various ways in which globalization simultaneously widens opportunities and deepens class divisions, and the ways in which it raises the possibility of hostility, envy, and vengeance developing within the recipients of neoliberalism’s spoils, to say nothing of its victims.

I discuss the ambiguities of the novel through an analysis of the narrator’s use of allegory, a form that, as Rita Copeland and Peter Struck note, is fundamentally “elusive, its surface by turns mimetic and anti-mimetic, its procedures intricate and at times seemingly inconsistent, and its meaning or ‘other’ sense — how it is encoded, or what it refers to intrinsically — often indeterminate” (2010: 2). In one sense, the indeterminacy of allegory does not seem an issue in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for it contains an allegory so obvious that it grates against the ambiguity noted by Copeland and Struck. Changez, who represents Pakistan (or the Islamic world more generally), changes from pro-American financial analyst to anti-American militant: he initially climbs American-Dream style from obscurity to success by securing for himself an Ivy League education, a prestigious job, and a beautiful love interest — the New York aristocrat, Erica, who represents Am-Erica — but, after 9/11, loses his foothold at Underwood Samson (whose initials are U.S.) and is forced to return to Pakistan due to immigration constraints. Others have read the lesson of this blunt form of allegory as the novel’s raison d’être, offering interpretations that are implicitly indebted to Fredric Jameson’s theory of third-world national allegory wherein private destiny is interpreted “as an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986: 69). ¹ Gohar Karim Khan, for example, reads the novel “as a Postcolonial and post-terrorist bildungsroman — a microcosmic representation of the recent alienation of Muslims around the world, and one that maps the transformative growth of a young American Muslim man into a nationalist, anti-colonial radical” (2011: 85). Whereas Jameson views the “third-world” subject as an allegory of national culture, Khan reads Changez as a representative of the vague religious-cultural category “Muslim”. Nevertheless, the crux of his reading corresponds to Jameson’s model: Changez’s private destiny is an allegory of the “alienation” experienced by “Muslims around the world” (2011: 85). In a less didactic but equally sympathetic reading, Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton argue that Changez offers “insightful criticism of the way in which the meaning of terrorism is defined by narratives of counter-terrorism to justify the state’s use of military force”, a perspective that they read as a statement by Hamid that the “‘war on terrorism’ [masks] an imperialist agenda” (2010: 14). ² These critics are not wrong to argue that the novel mobilizes “an alternative discourse on terrorism” (Khan, 2011: 92), nor that the protagonist is a bildungsroman figure, for Changez indeed begins as an executive in an American company and ends in Pakistan organizing political protests that appear “in the occasional war-on-terror montage” (Hamid, 2007: 182). Where arguments like these go wrong is in taking the allegory at face value, mistaking Hamid’s project to be the redemption of those politically compelled activists who are branded “terrorists” by the “empire”. Boehmer, Morton and Khan all stop short of considering why Hamid casts his protagonist as a bildungsroman figure who evolves from corporate raider to anti-American activist; instead they merely accept the narrator’s allegory as evidence of an agenda of pro-Muslim activism on the part of both narrator and novelist.

In my reading of him, Changez is less a sign of the culturally embattled Muslim than he is a pliable figure used by the narrator in a series of conflicting allegories that offer abstruse commentaries on the post-9/11 global context. These allegories, I argue, operate at two different levels in the novel. First, the narrator uses Changez to construct what I call a “third world transnational allegory”, an allegory of the “third world” subject’s existence between nation states. He does so by using travel as an allegorical sign to represent the interactions between nations and to show Changez’s uncomfortable and confusing position as a mobile transnational subject. Over the course of the main narrative, Changez travels to America as an international student, to Greece as a tourist, and to the Philippines and Chile as a corporate executive. In each place, Changez and the people he encounters are allegorical figures through which the narrator offers (frequently reductive) political commentaries about colonialism, postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and American imperialism. At this level of the narrative, Changez is a figure of the global citizen, one who is situated at the crossroads of various global and historical currents: as student, tourist, and corporate executive he follows the flows of capital and neoliberal power along globalization’s networks, symbolizing different things depending on the mode of travel in which he is engaged. The narrator capitalizes upon the elusiveness of the allegorical form to mobilize a series of false (or at least devious) allegories to draw attention to the inherent ambiguity of representation.

The relativization of representation verges on cliché within the postcolonial literary domain, but Hamid mobilizes this aspect of the novel so that the narrative itself comes to function as a meta-allegory of post-9/11 global culture. This is the second level at which allegory operates in The Reluctant Fundamentalist: the formal structure of the novel — its frame narrative and its unreliable narrative voice — works to create a textual uncertainty, even paranoia, that allegorically represents the global fear of terrorism in the post-9/11 era. From the outset, the frame narrative is unsettling and destabilizing. While it poses as a conversation between Changez-the-narrator and an American visitor to Lahore, the “conversation” is in fact a monologue controlled entirely by the narrator who inflicts his story — the main narrative — upon the silent American tourist. Tourism in the frame narrative is an allegory of the instability of the post-9/11 global environment, for the tourist exchange is framed in such a way that both the tourist and host become suspicious figures. The American tourist may simply be an innocuous traveller, but he may also be (as the narrator fears) a CIA agent who has been sent to Pakistan to assassinate him because the American government has marked him as a potential terrorist. Put another way, the American may be a tourist or may be a kind of terrorist himself — an agent employed in a state terrorist plot to help advance America’s goals in Pakistan (Combs, 2011: 94). If there is no way of determining whether tourism is an innocent practice of international sightseeing or a ruse for transnational espionage, the text uses the frame narrative as a way of exploring in a formal sense the instabilities and uncertainties fostered by globalization. It does this not only by unsettling the allegories in the main narrative, but also by presenting the exchange between the narrator and the American tourist as one infused with anxiety. In the frame narrative, the narrator adopts various conversational tactics — placation, threats, and politeness — as a means of maintaining control over his interlocutor, a feature that suggests that narration is a response to paranoia in the frame narrative.

Throughout this article, therefore, I am interested in the frames of meaning Hamid has constructed both in a narratological and discursive sense in his novel. The term “frame” here has a double meaning: on the one hand, I use it to refer to the text’s potential to frame its readers into believing the narrator’s devious allegories (as evinced in the critical discussions by Khan and by Boehmer and Morton cited above). On the other hand, I use it to refer to the methods of containment used throughout the text. In this second sense, the term “frame” is a Derridian metaphor: if, as Derrida argues, framing mobilizes a “series of oppositions”, denoting what is “art” and what is “general background” and defining “the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object”, allegory constructs frames, borders, and boundaries around things and connections between others in order to produce meaning (1987: 11, 45). The narrator continually reframes his story and his arguments, presenting at one moment a postcolonial-inflected critique of contemporary geopolitics, at the next reframing global inequities as a consequence of neoliberal structures, and at the next dismantling that frame as well. The only clear meaning to be drawn from The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s allegories is a deconstructivist one: since, as Derrida argues, it is impossible “to determine the intrinsic — what is framed — and know what one is excluding as frame and outside-the-frame”, Hamid undoes the work of his narrator’s allegorical framing devices, suggesting that meaning is subject to manipulation, that frames are moveable structures, and that containment, categorization, definition, and exclusion are always incomplete processes (Derrida, 1987: 63; emphasis in original).

If, as I suggest above, previous commentators on the novel have failed to question why Hamid casts his protagonist as a politicized bildungsroman figure, my answer to this is that he does so for a literary reason, and that is to explore the limits of his chosen narrative form. Peter Morey and others have read the text as a political work that demands that readers reconsider the borders they implicitly embrace in their understanding of global geopolitics. Morey argues that “The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an example of a sort of deterritorialization of literature which forces readers to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories of East and West, ‘Them and Us’ and so on — those categories continuously insisted upon in ‘war on terror’ discourse” (2011: 138). ⁴ However, while the narrator does indeed raise such political issues, I would argue that this is something of a ruse through which Hamid explores the possible misinterpretations and deliberate manipulation of discourse. He has a history of narrative experimentation that extends beyond The Reluctant Fundamentalist. His first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), perhaps the least innovative of his works narratologically speaking, tells its story in classic postmodern fashion through multiple narrative voices, while his third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), is that rare fictional beast, the second-person narrative. Narrated in the style of a self-help treatise, the novel places “you” as the protagonist, as you seek your fortune amidst the corruption of Pakistan. I regard The Reluctant Fundamentalist, his second novel, as another instance of his penchant for narratological experimentation, a work in which he explores the limits and ramifications of unreliable first-person monologue. Consequently I am less interested in selecting one of the allegorical representations of Changez as “true” than I am in considering the variable, uneven, and conflicted meanings that he produces through his depiction of the narrator’s construction of Changez as an allegorical figure.

Travel allegories: Framing hosts and guests

In the main narrative, the narrator uses Changez and those he encounters as he travels as allegorical representatives of the nations to which they belong. Framed either as host or guest of a nation, each party is used in a series of related allegories that offer, in turn, postcolonial, economic, and historical explanations of contemporary geopolitical events through which the narrator launches an explanation (and perhaps even a justification) for the 2001 terror attacks against America. There are numerous examples of the narrator’s framing of hosts and guests as geopolitical allegories: as an international student, Changez allegorically represents Pakistan (or the “third world” more generally) encountering the power of the American host nation; when he takes a celebratory holiday to Greece, he is positioned between moneyed America (represented by the Princeton graduates with whom he is holidaying) and the comparatively poor host nation (symbolized by Greek tourism workers); and as a corporate executive he carries with him the might of America, something he wields against the Philippines and Chile — the host countries he visits for work in the novel. It is not possible to explore here the full extent of the narrator’s framing and reframing of meaning in these host/guest encounters, but I want to discuss one example in detail in order to demonstrate the profuse inconsistencies in the narrator’s framing of Changez as a transnational allegorical figure.

The crystallization of the narrator’s host/guest allegories occurs in his representation of Changez’s work as an Underwood Samson executive. Amongst other assignments, Changez is sent to value a Filipino music-recording business in order to determine whether it is a worthy investment venture for their clients. The Underwood Samson executives are used to allegorically represent the ugliness of America’s global power. Gathering data, interviewing suppliers and employees, and building financial models, Changez reports that he feels “enormously powerful knowing my team was shaping the future. Would these workers be fired? Would these CDs be made elsewhere? We, indirectly of course, would help decide” (2007: 66; emphasis in original). The executives — the guests — are like parasites that feed upon the host, drain it of its resources and leave it for dead. Yet, in spite of Changez’s advantage over the Filipino company, the narrator establishes an association between him and the abused hosts. On the same page that Changez revels in his “enormous power”, the narrator presents what he suggests is evidence of how the Filipino people feel about America. Caught in a traffic jam in Manila, Changez glances out his limousine window and meets the gaze of a jeepney driver:

There was an undisguised hostility in his expression; I had no idea why. We had not met before — of that I was virtually certain — and in a few minutes we would probably never see one another again. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I stared back at him, getting angry myself […].

Afterwards, I tried to understand why he acted as he did. Perhaps, I thought, his wife just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans. I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, perusing several possibilities that all assumed — as their unconscious starting point — that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility. Then one of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him — at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work — and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him. (2007: 66–7; emphasis in original)

If the narrator’s allegory is taken at face value, the jeepney driver functions as a symbol of a nation which must “simply […] not like Americans”. Ostensibly, the jeepney driver’s gaze triggers Changez’s political awakening, his growing awareness about the unfairness of global relations symbolized by the spatial arrangement of the scene — the Americans enclosed inside a luxury car that sits amidst a throng of cheap vehicles driven by the third world poor — and his realization that he is implicated in that system.

There are problems, to which I will return in a moment, with the allegorical connections made by the narrator here between the “third world” parties in this scene. For now, though, I want to read the allegory in the spirit that the narrator presents it, that is, as a quasi-postcolonial argument in which a representative of a poor, abused nation expresses hatred for a neocolonial superpower. The animosity supposedly expressed by the jeepney driver is associated with 9/11 by the narrator, who covertly suggests that terrorism is an anticolonial act of resistance against American power. The exchange between Changez and the jeepney driver occurs just four pages before the text’s only representation of terrorism, the collapse of the World Trade Centre:

I was in my room, packing my things. I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized it was not fiction but news. I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased […].

I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. (2007: 72–3; emphasis in original)

The close textual proximity of this televised representation of 9/11 and the evidence of the jeepney driver’s hostility implies that there is an association between the two, as if the resentment of America’s victims finally erupts in a grand revenge scenario. If Changez is “caught up in the symbolism of it all”, 9/11 is a symbol of retribution within the logic deployed by the postcolonial host/guest allegory: that if America treats the rest of the world in the way that the American corporate executives treat foreign companies, the result will be 9/11. In other words, when the narrator’s allegory is accepted at face value, the culmination of the host/guest allegory is an anticolonial conceptualization of terrorism: the narrator constructs the terror event in pseudo-Fanonian terms as a form of resistance to the collective power abuses perpetrated by America.

While it is possible to read the host/guest allegory in the flat terms I have outlined thus far, this reading neglects the fractured meanings generated by the unreliable narrator’s description of the encounter. The jeepney driver’s supposed animosity is an untenable allegory of an American-Filipino neocolonial relationship, for, apart from hinging upon a series of conjectures indicated by the word “perhaps” (“Perhaps […] his wife just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans”), the allegorical associations between the individuals and nations are dubious. Most obviously, this episode reverses the allegorical associations between Changez and his country of birth, for instead of representing Pakistan as he does elsewhere in the novel, Changez now represents America. There are several layers of contradiction at work in this allegory: that Changez is not an American citizen, that he claims to feel a kinship with the jeepney driver and an alienation from the American colleague with whom he shares the car, that he enjoys the power his job gives him over people like the jeepney driver, and that elsewhere in the novel he makes clear his antipathy for America and Americans. The meaning ascribed to the exchange is also problematic in geopolitical terms insofar as the narrator polarizes America and the Philippines, while aligning the Philippines with Pakistan. The supposedly “unconscious starting point” of his allegorical interpretation of the exchange with the jeepney driver is that they share “a sort of third world sensibility” and that there is, allegorically speaking, a kinship between Pakistanis and Filipinos on the basis of a shared disadvantage in the face of American privilege. Both in historic and cultural terms, however, the two countries could not be more different: the Philippines is 90 per cent Christian in comparison with Pakistan’s 98 per cent Muslim majority, and Pakistan was colonized by the British whereas the Philippines was colonized by the United States who claimed it from the Spanish at the end of the nineteenth-century Spanish-American war. ⁵ Seen through an historical lens, Filipinos have more reasons to dislike their former American colonizers than Changez does, especially given that Pakistan is (officially at least) an ally of America. ⁶ The polarization between America and the Philippines in the allegory is equally problematic. This is because the Philippines — like America — is a bastion of neoliberalism: as of 2012, the nation was transferred to creditor status with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after four and half decades as a borrower, the result of macroeconomic targets set by the IMF and the World Bank (WB), and the privatization and deregulation of trade and public services (Central Banking Newsdesk, 2012; Nicolas, 2004). This is not to suggest that the Philippines is an equal player with America in the IMF and WB, for, as Robert Wade points out, America dominates these organizations by maintaining superior voting power (2002: 203). However, it does show how the Philippines is aligned with America in political and economic terms as a “successful” neoliberal nation, and how, therefore, the narrator’s allegorical representation of neocolonial American-Filipino relations is tenuous.

It is thus possible to read the allegorical exchange between Changez and the jeepney driver not as a representation of a world divided along national or racial lines, but rather as one of a world divided along economic lines. Taking into consideration the shared adherence of America and the Philippines to neoliberal principles, the terror event witnessed by Changez in the novel can be conceptualized as an act of retaliation not against America but against the neoliberal system of which he himself is not just a participant but a beneficiary. If, upon arrival in the Philippines, Changez observes the contrasts between the slums and “Manila’s glittering skyline and walled enclaves for the ultra-rich”, he is associated with the latter, and remains so throughout the novel (2007: 64). This is the case not just in his position as a corporate executive, but as a member of Pakistan’s historic elite, as a Princeton graduate, and, even after rejecting his life in America, as a university lecturer and activist in Lahore. When read in this way, Changez, the allegorical transnational subject, sits not between nations but within a web of capitalism that covers the entire globe. The exchange between Changez and the jeepney driver becomes an allegory of neoliberal power.

Reading the allegory in these terms shows how the narrator reframes not only the issue of Changez’s personal involvement as perpetrator or victim of neoliberal power, but also the relationship between global capitalism and terrorism. The narrator makes the suspicious suggestion through the economic elements of his allegory that terrorism is fair payment against the injustices wrought by capitalism because capitalism itself perpetrates a kind of terror. As I suggested in the opening paragraph of this essay, the narrator mobilizes a questionable relationship between “fundamentalism” and the neoliberal principles practiced by Underwood Samson’s executives:

Focus on the fundamentals. This was Underwood Samson’s guiding principle, drilled into us since our first day at work. It mandated a single-minded attention to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value. And that was precisely what I continued to do, more often than not with both skill and enthusiasm. Because to be perfectly honest, sir, the compassionate pangs I felt for soon-to-be-redundant workers were not overwhelming in their frequency; our job required a degree of commitment that left one with rather limited time for such distractions. (2007: 98; emphasis in original)

Given the other problematic arguments made by the narrator throughout the text, the implied reader is certainly prompted by the text to question the plausibility of the association drawn here between terrorists and capitalists. The narrator uses the term “fundamentals” here to gesture to the principles of “market fundamentalism”, a pejorative term used by critics of neoliberalism to refer to the “strong faith in unregulated markets and an associated distrust of governments, politics, politicians, government bureaucrats, government services and welfare provision” (Boldeman, 2007: 2). Gesturing to such critiques of capitalism, the narrator suggests a similarity between Underwood Samson’s “fundamentalism” and that which supposedly informs acts of terror. The slogan “Focus on the fundamentals” conveys all of the frenzied dogma supposedly possessed by terrorists: the doctrine is “drilled” into the employees, calling them to abandon all relative considerations and independent thought in favour of “single-mindedness” and a quest for an absolute reality that is cloistered in “the true value” of an asset. The result of this kind of fundamentalism is destruction: like the suicide bomber, Changez puts aside his “compassionate pangs” as he symbolically kills the workers through redundancy, prioritizing the work dictated by his superiors over the “distraction” of the human cost of such work. This allegorical association between corporatism and terror cuts in two directions: not only does it recast capitalism (symbolized by Underwood Samson) as a mode of terrorism, but it also recasts terror itself as a business practice, a payment for the inequalities wrought by the capitalist industries in the text. While the effects of capitalism upon developing nations remain very real concerns, Hamid’s representation of his narrator shows the malleability of postcolonial and anti-imperial discourses, demonstrating how legitimate arguments about global disparities of wealth and opportunity may be coopted in the service of potentially violent agendas. His narrator problematizes such arguments by showing how anything, including terrorism, can be framed as resistance. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s scathing representation of Changez-the-narrator suggests that the stereotypes others have read the novel as destabilizing may have some validity after all, or at least that their validity cannot be entirely discredited, since Changez — a young well-travelled Pakistani male — in some ways does indeed represent the stereotypical terrorist.

Terrorism allegories: Frame narratives, authority and paranoia

The political perspectives presented in the main narrative, then, are fractured: at one moment, the narrator presents Changez as a victim of neocolonial American power, and at the next as a willing perpetrator who helps neoliberal capitalism “colonize” the globe, a position he later self-righteously rejects. It could be argued, of course, that he is both victim and perpetrator, and that the narrative is an exercise in trying to make sense of that confusing transnational position. However, it is only possible to make this argument by disregarding the malice of the narrative, a point I will discuss more fully in a moment. It seems to me that Hamid has created in the narrator a figure who narrates as a way of combatting the kinds of paranoias associated with the post-9/11 context (fears about terrorism, unpredictability and uncertainty, for example). Put another way, I read the unreliable political perspectives in the main narrative as part of a meta-allegorical project in which the narrative itself becomes an allegory of the post-9/11 milieu.

The frame narrative is a crucial part of this project, for it is through the frame narrative that Changez-the-narrator claims his authority in a quest to stabilize his paranoia. Monkica Fludernik argues that frame narratives function as “strategies of authentication”, particularly when, as in the case of Hamid’s text, the narrative is told in the first person (2006: 58). However, the frame narrative pulls away from any notion of authenticity to assert not only the unreliability of the narrator (a point to which I will return below), but the inherent unreliability of its own formal features. Fictional first-person narrators like Changez may claim to tell the “truth”, but, like all narrators, their truth is fictitious by definition, the product of their author’s imagination. This is to some extent true for all narratives, whether fictitious or autobiographical, because all narratives are, of course, representations and hence not objective. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s overt destabilization of its narrator’s authenticity, though, distinguishes it from narratives that claim to present the truth: because the text is comprised solely of Changez-the-narrator’s voice, this establishes the main narrative as his responsibility, his story, and his perspective. It is therefore not necessarily trustworthy, being a product of his personality, history, and idiosyncrasies, and cannot be read simply as the life story of Changez-the-character who is what Mieke Bal calls “an actor”, a figure that is “conjured” by a narrator from within a frame story and who performs according to his or her will in the main narrative (2006: 49). The effect of the narrator’s absolute control over the frame narrative is that there is no objective source to verify the details of Changez’s life. Rather than relying on Fludernik’s term “strategy of authentication”, I prefer to describe the function of the frame narrative in Hamid’s text as a “strategy of authority”, one that is bound up with the text’s exploration of paranoia. Like the term “authentic” from which Fludernik’s “authentication” is derived, “authority” can mean “a reliable and accepted source of information”, but at the same time, it carries the additional meaning of “the power to control or command”. Both senses of authority are at work in the frame narrative: it works to frame readers into believing that the main narrative is authoritative, while at the same time gesturing toward the narrator’s quest for authority as control.

The narrator invests himself with narratological authority by demonstrating his sense of belonging in Lahore: his authority as a narrator is in part a function of his local authenticity — his knowledge of the area, and his ability, consequently, to dominate the trajectory of the so-called conversation in the text. The opening paragraphs of the novel show how the narrator’s quest for authority (in the sense of “power”) hinges upon his authority (in the sense of “authentic”) about the locale:

Excuse me sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact, you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.

How did I know you were an American? No, not by the colour of your skin; we have a range of complexions in this country, and yours occurs often among the people of our northwest frontier. Nor was it your dress that gave you away; a European tourist could as easily have purchased in Des Moines your suit […].

Surely, at this time of day, only one thing could have brought you to the district of Old Anarkali — named, as you may be aware, after a courtesan immured for loving a prince — and that is the quest for the perfect cup of tea. Have I guessed correctly? Then allow me, sir, to suggest my favorite among these many establishments. Yes, this is the one. Its metal chairs are no better upholstered, its wooden tables equally rough, and it is, like the others, open to the sky. But the quality of its tea, I assure you, is unparalleled. (2007: 1–2; emphasis in original)

A system of power is established from the text’s first page, showing how the narrator dominates the text not only with his words but with his directing of the exchange between himself and the tourist. Playing on tourists’ lack of self-assurance in foreign environments, the narrator imposes his assistance upon the American whether or not he requires it: the first words he utters — “Excuse me sir, but may I be of assistance?” — are polite, yet the formal restrictions of the narrative force the American to accept the narrator’s offer. Beneath the narrator’s hospitality are covert reminders that Lahore is his city and that, therefore, he has the upper hand: “I am a native of this city”, he says, before demonstrating his knowledge of local history and legend (the meaning of “Old Anarkali”), the district’s specialties (“the perfect cup of tea”), his ability to distinguish between identical “establishments”, and the power of his word as to which of them is “unparalleled”. The narrator’s authority is thus also a signal of the tourist’s vulnerable status in Lahore, a status that is reflected at the formal level in his inability to speak.

The link between narratological authority and touristic authenticity in the frame narrative is crucial to the text’s destabilization project, for the narrator’s power over the narrative is a slippery, unstable allegory of his power within the tourist transaction and, in a wider sense, his power within global space. Since the text is comprised exclusively of his words, the narrator seems to exercise absolute control over the narrative, a power that is allegorically echoed in his control over the tourist exchange. Yet, the text suggests that his quest for authority is propelled by a sense of fear. The narrator’s suspicion and unease about the American is seen in his usage of the term “tourist” in a hypothetical statement that signals his awareness that “tourists” travel for reasons other than pleasure: “How did I know you were American? […] [It wasn’t] your dress that gave you away; a European tourist could as easily have purchased in Des Moines your suit” (1–2). The evocation of the hypothetical European tourist dressed as an American acts as a covert indication from the narrator that he is aware that while his interlocutor may appear to be a tourist, he could indeed be in Lahore on some sort of other business; the fact he appears to be “looking for something: more than looking, in fact [he seems] to be on a mission” suggests that the narrator fears that business may be of a governmental nature (1). The word “mission”, coupled with the American’s imposing stature (the narrator aligns his physique to that of “sportsmen and soldiers”) reveals a fear which is not made explicit by the narrator until the second to last page of the novel: “I was warned by my comrades that America might react to my admittedly intemperate remarks [about American foreign policy] by sending an emissary to intimidate me or worse” (2; 182–3). The linguistic connections between the words “mission” and “emissary” show that the narrator is suspicious about the American from the outset, even if the details of that suspicion — that the emissary’s mission might be to kill him — become plain only toward the end of the novel.

In response to this fear, the narrator capitalizes upon his role as host and uses his position to try to intimidate the American. His descriptions of Pakistani cuisine are particularly revealing in this regard:

Let us now order our dinner. You would rather wait, you say, and eat upon your return to your hotel? But I insist! You must not pass up such an authentic introduction to Lahori cuisine; it will, given the dishes for which this market is justifiably renowned, be a purely carnivorous feast — one that harks back to an era before man’s knowledge of cholesterol made him fearful of his prey […].

These, sir, are predatory delicacies, delicacies imbued with a hint of luxury, of wanton abandon. Not for us the vegetarian recipes one finds across the border to the east, nor the sanitized, sterilized, processed meats so common in your homeland. Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire. (2007: 100–1)

This passage shows the narrator lacing his hospitality with an air of threat drawn from stereotypes about nations associated with terrorism. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s narrator self-consciously implies that the food of Pakistan carries a culture of violence. His descriptions of the food as a “carnivorous feast”, as “prey”, and as “predatory delicacies” hint not only at the underlying violence by which this food is procured (in contrast, say, to the vegetarian fare of India), but also suggests a cultural willingness in Pakistan — even pleasure — to engage in violence: “Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire.” The narrator associates Pakistani cuisine with primal desires, casting man as hunter and beast as prey, and situating Pakistani culture outside of the domain of civilization symbolized by medical knowledge about cholesterol. The meal becomes a way for the narrator to taunt the American, reminding him that he is vulnerable to the “violent” people of Pakistan.

If the frame narrative is, as I am arguing, a space which the narrator strives to master through narration, Hamid shows that this quest is always incomplete, for the narrator remains unable to control the narrative process. In both tourist exchange and narrative, there is an escalating sense of inconsistency which stems from the narrator’s increasingly tenuous grasp on his own authority. The threatening undertones present in the descriptions of “authentic Pakistani” food, for example, become more pronounced towards the end of the novel in connection with the architecture of Lahore which the narrator points out to the American as he walks him back to his hotel:

I gather you have noticed that we are not alone in our desire to depart. Yes, others have made their way to Mall Road behind us, such as that waiter who was so unusually attentive and yet seemed to rub against your grain. There is nothing surprising in that; the evening’s work is now done. I would ask you to direct your gaze instead to these lovely buildings — in varying states of disrepair — which date to the British era and function geographically and architecturally as a link between the ancient and contemporary parts of our city. How delightful they are […]. No, not in the case of that retailer of guns and ammunition, as you correctly point out — but surely you must concede for the most part that they are charming and rather quaint. (2007: 170–1)

Here the narrator deliberately incites anxiety within the American by allowing stereotypical links between terrorism, terrorists, and Pakistan to rise to the surface of his tour-guide diction. The menace arises through the incongruity of sightseeing on an “unlit and empty” street, suggesting that the narrator draws the American’s attention to the colonial buildings “in varying states of disrepair” as a way of distracting him from the dangers that may be closing in around him — the waiter, for example, may be working with the narrator in a plot to assassinate the American. He also covertly refers to the stereotype of Pakistan as an anarchic and volatile terrorist haven: the damaged buildings represent the ruin of the order supposedly imposed during “the British era” of colonialism when they were constructed, a trajectory which terminates at the door of a “retailer of guns and ammunition” that presumably caters to the demand for arms within contemporary Pakistan.

The escalation of threat towards the end of the novel, whether deliberately evoked or not, suggests the possibility that the narrator is compelled by internal impulses and vengeances that are beyond his control. There is something frightening about the narrator’s lust for power and the extent to which he exercises this over someone who may, after all, be nothing more than a tourist. The novel ends ambiguously with the narrator denying that he is signalling to the waiter who follows them, and the American reaching into his jacket for what the narrator says he hopes are his business cards, but which could equally be a weapon. Here, once again, narrative frames are undone, for the action of the novel overflows its own boundaries: the climactic moment of the encounter documented throughout the entirety of the novel takes place (or may not at all) beyond the novel’s final page. Hamid refuses to pin his narrator down, at least as far as practical action is concerned. Just what the narrator is prepared to do is unclear in the novel, but what is clear is that he is prepared to say anything. “I cannot now recall many of the details of the events I have been relating to you,” he says when the American asks a question. “I am […] telling you a history, and in history […] it is the thrust of one’s narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one’s details” (2007: 118). This cavalier approach to accuracy grates against his repeated insistences about his honesty: “I assure you, sir: you can trust me. I am not in the habit of inventing untruths! […] I see from your expression that you do not believe me. No matter, I am confident in the truth of my words” (2007: 152, 181). The contradiction may show that the narrator is unaware of his own inconsistencies, but a more plausible reading, especially given the associations between uncertainty and paranoia in the text, is that he contradicts himself as a way of escalating his interlocutor’s angst. The words “assure”, “trust”, “confident”, and “truth” imply that the narrative framed by this tourist exchange operates solely on the basis of trust, confidences, and assurances from a narrator who is conspicuously unstable.

This instability is less important to my argument in a psychological sense than it is in a narratological sense. Since the narrator has no other purpose other than to narrate, since his entire self is bound up with the act of narrating, his instability affects his reliability as a storyteller, which in turn problematizes every aspect of the story he tells about Changez. The ambiguity of the exchange in the frame narrative functions as an allegory of the uncertainties in the globalized world, and the narration itself as an allegory of the attempt to combat paranoia by maintaining control in the face of an increasingly uncertain global space. The core of this novel — its central unsolvable mystery — is the figure of Changez-the-narrator. Through him and his narrative, Hamid presents an unsettling allegory of the post-9/11 world, a space in which friends and enemies, paranoia and authority, activism and terrorism are increasingly indistinguishable.