Political engagement for characters can be compensation for personal emptiness, not conviction.

Evidence

The Bengal Tigers’ agenda threatens to become more sectarian and international, marked by concern for suffering Muslims around the world and sympathy for violent direct action but also characterized by a kind of Muslim exceptionalism that the novel is clearly critical of. Even the heady sense of power Nazneen experiences by attending their meetings and feeling she can at last act to influence world affairs is offset by the omniscient narrator’s insistence that this sense of power is in fact simply a compensation for unfulfilled personal longings. Of Nazneen’s sense of sympathy for the Muslim victims of violence in Chechnya and Palestine, we are told that “she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow” (244). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant: the narrator unmasking characters’ political commitment as psychological compensation is a device to weigh when reading Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Political agency’s absence, not its demands, oppresses people; participation is euphoric. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2005
• QUESTION: Track whether Morey treats this narrator-authorial unmasking as honest critique or as a way of disqualifying political feeling.