Novels can subvert the individualist protagonist arc toward communal loyalties

Evidence

The self-effacing qualities that lead to this result are prominent in Najwa throughout the story. All of her decisions tend toward the consolidation or preservation of community and family rather than toward the individual fulfillment expected of a novelistic protagonist. Losing her own family makes her acutely aware of the value of kinship support networks, and she gives up Tamer in part to stop him from “sinning” against his mother through disobedience and with the aim of keeping his family together. Najwa’s narrating voice rationalizes her acceptance of the bribe in terms of releasing her young lover back to his mother, and on the final page, half-dreaming, she wonders whether she really loved him at all. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast with Changez and other individualist narrators in Hamid; also echoes the reader’s own framing of contested vs reinforcing Islamophobia — does self-effacement itself contest Western narrative norms.