Second-person narration lets a novel’s epilogue make you the migrant subject

Evidence

The other ending takes the form of a short epilogue. Instead of the family reunion in Karachi we might be expecting, the novel gives us a description of a migrant’s arrival in New York. This may amount to a flashback, returning us to Chuck’s early and only partly narrated first days in the United States. However, the switch to the second-person pronoun you draws us in as the putative subject of the scene and gives it a broader, symbolic resonance. In one reading, this ending could be an imaginative attempt to turn back the clock to before September 11, 2001, and thus to reclaim the past for its unrealized possibilities—much as the final pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006) includes cathartic images of the famous falling man from the North Tower of the Word Trade Center, which, when used as a flicker book, reverses the plunge and returns the tiny figure to the top of the building and to life. However, in view of what has gone before in the novel, the epilogue perhaps more compellingly gestures toward the continued allure of New York as the great melting-pot city for all those migrants who come to buy into its dream, as yet unaware of the modern carceral nightmare it has become. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Home Boy’s you-shift resonates with The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s direct second-person address to the American listener — both texts draw the reader into the migrant subject position.