The Theme of Loneliness and Exile in Mohsin Hamid’s ‘the Reluctant Fundamentalist’

The paper will focus on the different impulses of loneliness and exile in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that Changez, the central character and narrator, goes through in the United States of America while working as an employee at a firm called Underwood Samson and his subsequent return to Pakistan, his native country where he assumes to appears to extremely nationalistic. This is to argue that Changez’s desperate attempt at assuming this stance has its cultural roots in the cultural alienation and racism that he is subjected to while in America and his futility to naturally integrate with a way of a Pakistani. This essay will portray how Changez’s analysis of American corporate fundamentalism branches from his absence of a sense of belonging to a foreign culture and from a feeling of displaced identity.

‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid is a perfect illustration of how an author can create an inevitable situation of artistic dread and verbal control. It is also a praiseworthy example of how an endless tension between identical polarities of understanding and alienation can be continued across the pages by altering the narrative voice in terms of its tone, texture, and reliability. The work of literature is exclusively occupied by the overwhelming voice of Changez, its storyteller, and principal character. The enchanting openness of his personality and the fresh charm of his appearance ensure a fascinating one-sided exchange. His monologue starts with a proper and apparently kind offer to be of help to an American, who slowly settles into the role of a silent speaker and whose ethnicity is brought into the reckoning within the first three lines of the novel: “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”.

A set of conventions, which involves racial stereotypes prevalent in a post-9/11 world, is ignored in a space of a few sentences. Changez appropriately recognizes the man as an American by his ‘bearing’, not by the colour of his skin or his dress inclinations. It seems to Changez that the latter is on a ‘mission’. Both of these words – ‘bearing’ and ‘mission’– undertake powerful nationalistic implications as the novel advances. Changez encounters the American foreigner at a tea shop in Lahore and takes him on a fabulous ride to Changez’s past and expresses him about his time at Princeton, his profession at Underwood Samson, his journey with associates to Greece, his love affair with Erica, about Erica’s departed concubine Chris, his ultimate disappointment with his career and America in broad, his homecoming to Pakistan and succeeding part as a university lecturer and a strict promoter of disinterest from America.The themes of integration and exile constitute the root of the novel.

Near the start of his American familiarity, Changez’s desire to assimilate with America is apparent but this ambition is bonded with an idiosyncratic motivation to stand out – to noticeably proclaim his attitude with an air of official propriety. He reports with composure, “At Princeton, I conducted myself in public like a young prince, generous and carefree”. Further, he asserts with a positive amount of pride and conceit: “I have never, to the best of my knowledge, had any fear of solitude”. His self-contented happiness at having been accepted by people at Princeton is manifested through the line: “Most people I met were taken in by my public persona”. These attributes in him change and the rest of the novel shadows the story of Changez’s growing loneliness in a number of domains of life.

To begin with, Changez’s story makes it clear that he is hardworking, chivalrous, and generally recognized. He, as a narrator, may not be reliable. Through his sole voice, we are obliged to heed to it. While recounting his interview at Underwood Samson to the American, he creates a deviation which is slightly hubristic. The truth that Changez expresses his story in actual time makes it extra convincing. There is a nonstop parallelism between the actions happening in the tea shop in Lahore in the current moment and the America of Changez’s past, which gives the storyline a feeling of unified eternity. Moreover, the distinctive way Changez describes the city of Lahore, with the imprecise onsets and partings of anonymous, unidentified figures is charming and also articulates in detail his acquaintance with the place.

On the contrary, there is an unruffled impartiality in the manner of his description of America, with the probable exception of New York – a city with which he appears to be still nostalgically associated. His enthusiasm at getting the employment at Underwood Samson and the liberty and economic wildness it offers is complemented by a troublesome feeling of cultural-dislocation: “In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker” (33).Moreover, soon it leads to dissatisfaction with the gross dissimilarity in scientific and industrial progression between America and Pakistan which makes him to induce, with a definite degree of emotional homesickness, the past splendors of the country that would be Pakistan. Ironically, the primordial Indus Valley civilization is compelled to challenge with modern America: Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education.

There is unquestionably no purpose to think that the modern populaces of Lahore are the same folks who once occupied the ‘Indus River basin’. Changez then takes a broad view and attempts to forge an invented identity. Also opposed with what he progressively identifies as the intruding supremacy of American neo-imperialism, he needs to associate himself with the alternative standard so as to be in the position to stand up to it. The disconnections that are produced between assimilation and isolation in Changez’s essence are: Changez, then, is not just the victim of a national identity, but of multiple and conflicting ones. As he moves through life, when he does move, he cannot help but think of himself as a member of some ‘we’ – but he cannot, for that, seem to settle on one ‘we’ to adopt, or even a consistent set of them. He is, at different times in the novel, a Third Worlder, a Muslim, a Pakistani, a member of the Indus River Basin Civilization, a New Yorker, and a Princetonian.

Changez might not be scared of seclusion, as he claims, nonetheless he undoubtedly is not comfortable with it, powerless as he is to travel forward in life alone. While employed at Underwood Samson, he acquires gratitude and is normally treasured. However, he appears to be alienated steadily by the way the company worked and the fundamentals within which its viewpoint stood. Maybe he starts to discovery hidden qualities of colonialism in Underwood Samson and attempts to free himself from it. Therefore, when he says ‘I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink—an activity classified as “new hire cultivation” — and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day!’, he performs that not only with childish excitement but also with a feeling of minor repentance. At the same time, the cultural boundary is further expanded when he is directed on a venture to Manila where he discovers himself divided between a longing to be observed by the Filipinos as one of the “members of the officer class of global business” and an unwillingness to routinely tell Filipino officials of his father’s age: “I need it now”. He is neither accepted as an American nor as an Asian which provokes him to mirror on the dissimilarities in the ways in which a courteous address is made to an old person in English as well as in Urdu. Moreover, Changez’s feeling of loneliness and exile is heightened because of the American ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan in the latter part of October in that same year. He is primarily elusive, ‘preferring not to watch the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below”. His evasion suggests his reluctance to take a place in respect to this political occurrence. To a deeper sense, it articulates his distress at having to pick between America and Afghanistan – a country he compassionately calls ‘Pakistan’s neighbor, our friend, and a fellow Muslim nation’. At this moment he starts to disassemble the American side of his individuality.

The anger quickens the progression of disassembling of Changez’s American identity and this procedure concludes in an answer to the 9/11 event that shocks Changez as much as it surprises the reader. This reaction distances Changez in the reader’s, particularly an American reader viewpoint. This passage of climax merits to be cited in its fullness: The following evening was supposed to be our last in Manila. 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 that it was not fiction but news. I stared at 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.

Furthermore, the important point here is the straightforwardness and frankness with which he utters this to an American listener. He makes reference to his own surprise at the thought of being ‘pleased’: ‘So when I tell you I was pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents, I do so with a profound sense of perplexity’. However, shortly he declares that he has taken up with the representation of the incident – his desire derived from the conception that “someone had so visibly brought America to her knees’. The failure to detach the real from the representative is an additional attribute that personifies Changez’s inner feelings. Nonetheless, the writer shapes the story up to this level in such a way that the reader, even though having lost his compassion with Changez, does not find him unreliable as a character. Moreover, during the time of the disastrous 9/11, his affiliation with Erica also changes.To an excessive degree, Changez feels fascinated by Erica owing her subtlety, density, and subtle opposition. Homesickness, somewhat that they both experience, offer them with an unconscious basis for joint identification which ultimately leads to an acquaintance but it is exactly longing that ends any possibility of an unwavering relationship. Erica and Changez both get imprisoned in their personal past. Changez asserts that he matured “with a poor boy’s sense of longing”and the shelter that loneliness offers him can be perceived as an elicitation of “imagined memories”that he had perceived a few of his folks adhering on to while he was budding. Remembering, Changez declares, “Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction…”.

Changez and Erica’s initial trouble in having sex symbolically shows Changez’s helplessness to “penetrate” a foreign culture that is not his and an enigmatic past that Erica is imprisoned into. Her desirability toward him partially results from his amiable conduct and his glamorous uniqueness. He exemplifies for him all that is bygone, detached, isolated, splendid and finally exile. Nonetheless, there is a wall that rifts them based on the difference in their cultural upbringings and the difference in their own private life of loneliness. As the novel advances, Changez is more and more drawn into a feeling of the country where he belongs to.

Moreover, Erica is progressively troubled by the reminiscence of her departed lover, Chris. These are the opposing impulses that isolate them. Erica discovered or at least struggled to discover, Chris in Changez. The fact is, Changez looked for “Am-erica” in Erica. It is not only Changez whose idea is handicapped by loneliness but perhaps Erica’s also in respect to her downfall is extremely symbolic and indicative. The steady ending of their affiliation is, suggestive of the collapse between the two cultures. Erica’s infatuated identification with Chris surges as the novel progresses and she longs for him with a passion that limits on a severe feeling of loneliness. Owing to this, her struggle in interacting with the exterior world increases and she spins down into an unhappiness. Sadly, Changez discovers her cold and unresponsive. The passing away of Chris has caused in the demise of her sexuality: ‘Her sexuality, she said, had been mostly dormant since his death. She had only once achieved orgasm, and that, too, by fantasizing of him’. She endeavours to compensate for the lack of sexuality with energetic creative activity. Even Erica’s document for her novel provides no clue as to her situation and Changez is incapable to ‘locate Erica in the rhythms or sounds of what she had written’.

Erica is dressed in Chris’ shirt on a holiday in Greece, on the beach and this imagery is unmistakable. She declines to believe that Chris is dead and hence feels the continual impulse to revive him metaphorically. She transforms into Chris and in this transformation her own self is incorporated: “Suffice it to say that theirs had been an unusual love, with such a degree of commingling of identities that when Chris died, Erica felt she had lost herself; even now, she said, she did not know if she could be found”. In Erica’s opinion, Chris was “a good-looking boy with what she described as an Old World appeal”. Thus, it is very obvious from this why Changez comes to momentarily occupy the emptiness made by Chris’ demise in Erica’s life. Changez, whose conviction in the ‘fundamentals’ of Underwood Samson has been fading gradually, finds himself twice-alienated at partaking to play the character of a dead lover. The consciousness that Erica, has her personal set of exile traces that are either in handy conflict with or apathetic to Changez’s historic trait happens after Changez goes through Erica’s literary work. When he had started understanding it, he had been anxious that this might be the final stage he was in the range of Erica’s speech. Erica’s voice, which provides a well and more consistent image of her abstract vision of normality and of the liberating vigour of her imaginative quest, offers no comfort to Changez. He also does not appear anywhere in Erica’s story. With fatigued acceptance he admits: “I had begun to understand that she had chosen not to be part of my story; her own had proven too compelling, and she was — at that moment and in her own way — following it to its conclusion, passing through places I could not reach”. Changez’s life is not that of Erica’s. Hamid’s novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is hence on a wider level, a tale of loneliness and exile and communication collapse which makes one question the system that administers one’s life and detaches one from the society diverse from one in terms of culture, civilization, and economy.