Free indirect speech can deny rather than grant readerly identification with an extremist character

Evidence

Despite odd flickers of life, Casa remains a character so narrow in outlook as to appear only semiconscious. In a novel anxious to extend its sympathies to struggling souls in their quest for meaning, the brainwashed Casa stands beyond the pale of readerly empathy—detached, disorientated, and disorientating. We learn of his orphaned status, but the uneasy blend of omniscience and free indirect speech used at one point to describe his weak sense of himself renders his alienation but also denies us the usual means by which to identify with him: “He doesn’t even know his own name, doesn’t even know how he ended up in the orphanages and madrasas. A nameless child becomes a ghost, he had been told once, because no one without a name can get a firm enough foothold in the next world. It roams the world, making itself visible to the living in order to be addressed in some way—The Long-haired One, The One who has Green Eyes—but humans run away from ghosts and won’t address them” (334). The neutral, deadened tone is of significance here. There is an attempt at a submerged pathos, but in the end Casa remains a blank, his background evacuated and his personality a void that has been filled in by others with nefarious ends in mind. Cilano has suggested that Casa is an “absence,” yet one historicized through reference to a madrasa education that situates him as a product of the Islamization moment of the 1980s. He is thus both “an existential cipher and a product of history.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 404

Categorization

• DEFINE: Models the technique where free indirect discourse is deployed to deaden rather than humanize character.
• XREF: Directly useful tool for how Naqvi and Hamid handle their own violent or radicalized characters vs. sympathetic narrators.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Hamid’s Changez or Naqvi’s protagonist receive conventional FID empathy in ways that mark them as contesting rather than reinforcing the stereotype Casa embodies?