Perowne’s surgery on Baxter enacts Western rational mastery over the racialized other

Evidence

Seen in this way, Perowne’s own ambivalence, like that of the text itself, ends up being a testament to the liberal good faith of the West. His magisterial autonomy is played out literally over the prone body of Baxter as he operates on him. The rational agent has survived a nasty scare but is finally given the ability to “invade” the very body of his disarmed adversary, shining the light of scientific knowledge into the dark mind of one whose own fate is, as we have already been told, the subject of unrelenting biological determinism that is leading him to an early grave. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s two novels — the instrumentality of the rational liberal subject over the silenced other echoes The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s framing of Changez and Home Boy’s rendering of the post-9/11 Muslim male body.
• SEED: Could become the hinge claim in the reader’s argument: the liberal protagonist’s ‘surgical’ benevolence is itself a form of domination the contesting novels expose.