Novels privilege reflective protagonists over precariously situated everyday migrants

Evidence

To some extent, though, Mo and Claire have the luxury of being able to reflect with a degree of ironic distance on the media circus of which they are part. … From Indian restaurant workers and Pakistani news vendors to Bengali storekeepers and Muslim subway station managers, the life of South Asian citizens of New York is depicted as precarious after 9/11, even as they go about their daily business. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 289

Categorization

• XREF: A critical lever for the reader’s hinge work — the same structural asymmetry (educated reflective narrator vs. voiceless wider diaspora) shapes The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Homesickness.
• SEED: Essay angle: who gets the ironic distance in 9/11 fiction — reflective protagonists versus background everyday migrants — as a metric for how contesting a novel really is.