The Reluctant Fundamentalist works as a double-authored text with competing narrators

Evidence

I would argue that this insight encapsulates The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s concerns and the mode of their inscription: what the story tells, to whom, and how it is told. In other words, the novel enacts a “return of the author” as what Gupta calls an “explanatory construct, as a subject in whom intellectual property is vested, as an implicit biographical subject or historical reference point.” The novel can be seen to have a double author: Mohsin Hamid the historical personage—author and authority on Pakistan—and Changez the knowing, manipulative author of the narrative we are given to read. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 464

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘double author’ concept: the historical personage-author versus the knowing fictional author, which is the reader’s key tool for separating Hamid from Changez.
• XREF: Central to the reader’s core task — a sharp close-reading instrument for deciding whether Hamid contests or merely stages Islamophobia.