A memoir can claim literary polyphony while actually suppressing dissent through authorial control

Evidence

In place of that celebrated novelistic polyphony, Nafisi’s memoir employs what we might call a carefully controlled directive monologue—editorializing, interpreting, and attempting to suppress any critical engagement. All voices are homogenized and subsumed. … Although he is depicted as a supposedly semimythical figure who has “created an elaborate fiction out of his relationship with the world” (173), he remains a mirror for Nafisi herself, a cut-price Wizard of Oz, confirming her in the rightness of her own decisions and urging her to have the courage of her convictions. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 237

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘directive monologue’ as a critical term — the opposite pole of novelistic polyphony the reader needs for measuring whether Hamid and Naqvi merely reinforce Islamophobia.
• XREF: Connects to Hamid and Naqvi as the test cases — where do their narrators become ‘directive monologues’ suppressing polyphony vs. genuinely multivoiced?
• ADDENDUM: The polyphony-vs-monologue axis is exactly the tool for reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy as evidence rather than illustration, paralleling How to Read Literature’s use of close reading.