Changez’s downfall comes from being forced to choose sides

Evidence

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel that discomfits the reader and forces him or her to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories “East” and “West,” “them” and “us,” and so on. The novel tells the story of Changez, a young middle-class Pakistani who comes to study at a prestigious university in the United States and who is then cherry-picked for a high-flying job with Underwood Samson, a New York firm specializing in valuing companies for takeover. Changez at first identifies fully with his privileged new life serving global capitalism and, most importantly, falls in love with the wealthy, beautiful, young, would-be novelist Erica. But their relationship is stymied by her continued fixation with her dead lover, Chris, and it falls apart after 9/11 when Changez finds himself adrift in an America seeking the reassuring cultural and national certainties of an older time and that becomes insular and unwelcoming. An epiphany caused by a talk with a left-wing Chilean publisher, whose company Changez has been sent to evaluate for takeover, leads him to consider his own position in a scenario where sides are being chosen, and so—with Erica having disappeared and possibly committed suicide—he returns to Pakistan and establishes himself as an anti-American firebrand lecturer, a decision that may or may not have set a U.S. agent on his tail. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Reader’s core task — this is the Hamid novel being analyzed in their own project; provides the plot baseline from which Morey’s analytical claims diverge. — connects to: The left lost by framing freedom and fairness as a forced choice — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 104; Hamid represents Changez’s identity as fluid rather than essentially Pakistani; Regimes shape political opportunity structure through toleration and forbidding choices — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 445
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The left lost by framing freedom and fairness as a forced choice — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 104; Hamid represents Changez’s identity as fluid rather than essentially Pakistani; Regimes shape political opportunity structure through toleration and forbidding choices — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 445

Broader Connections

• Hamid represents Changez’s identity as fluid rather than essentially Pakistani #complicates (0.72)