Influences and Transformations: Mohsin Hamid’s Mongrelization of the West and the East in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

This essay examines the motifs, tropes, and spiritual disciplines in the Western and Eastern texts from which Hamid draws to characterize Changez’s narrative, and argues that the author, by subjecting the American guest as well as readers of his novella to Changez’s penchant for book-name-dropping, motivates a contextualized way of knowing various forms of fundamentalism. The theme of self-made man in The Great Gatsby is reworked to demystify American meritocracy as a racist-classist tool of internal imperialism and global hegemony. The sexual-spiritual entanglement between Toru, Naoko, and Kizuki in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood - a bildungsroman also inspired by The Great Gatsby - provides a model for Hamid, a self-confessed admirer of the Japanese author, to depict his characters’ love triangle. The teaching of Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita is evoked to portray Changez’s ethical and spiritual conundrums. Harking back to Heart of Darkness, Hamid replaces Conrad’s frame narrative with two clashing narrative streams to illustrate the empire outside and inside his evolving postcolonial subject. The double/foil embodied by Kurtz and Marlow sees its more intricate version in Hamid’s appropriation of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” While Irving’s pair in the context of Hamid’s novella encapsulates all such fluid positions Changez and his interlocutor play as prey and predator, host and guest, and nationalist and imperialist, the reference to the gothic tale serves to call out a corresponding phenomenon of oblivion and self-centeredness in contemporary America.