The narrator can smuggle contestable claims through free indirect speech

Evidence

However, speaking on behalf of this illiterate Afghan boy does bring responsibilities with which Aslam is perhaps somewhat cavalier. He is not above omniscient intrusion when it seems necessary to emphasize the boy’s closed-mindedness. Similarly, there are significant quirks of tone, as when the culturally monomaniacal Casa unfeasibly relativizes his worldview by crediting the self-sacrificing passengers aboard United Flight 93 on 9/11 with the same motives as “martyrdom bombers” (250). There is also the insistent deployment of free indirect speech, punctuating the characters’ thoughts and dialogue with something more distanced and therefore seemingly objective; the stream of thought conveying Lara’s nighttime dash to try at last to discover the fate of her brother is punctuated by a much cooler “external voice” regaling us with the highly debatable assertion that “the religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science” (133). This manipulation of the text’s polyphony contributes to a sense that Aslam is trying to “have it both ways”: to condemn the excesses of religious fundamentalism but also to claim the ability to penetrate the conflicted inner worlds of its adherents to find the embers of a common humanity after all. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 406

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names free indirect speech and the ‘external voice’ as the technique by which an author’s debatable assertion gains seeming objectivity.
• XREF: Directly maps to how Naqvi’s and Hamid’s narrators manage polyphony — an ironized first person versus an embedded omniscient voice. — connects to: Free indirect discourse is the literary form most faithful to bad faith. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 547
• SEED: Essay angle: the narrator’s ventriloquized ‘external voice’ as the precise craft device that distinguishes contesting novels from those that quietly reinforce — test against Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.