The hidden dialogue(s) in Mohsin Hamid’s "The reluctant fundamentalist"

Sitting face to face in a café in Lahore are two men, a Pakistani and an American. Although they are talking, only the first one can be heard: Changez, the narrator, engages us and his captive audience, the cautious foreigner, in a monologue unfolding in real time for the rest of the meeting and for the rest of the book. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid is a novel written in the form of dramatic monologue, yet what it really shows is a hidden dialogue which takes place on several levels. It may be said that the two men in polite, yet tense, conversation symbolise the ambiguous post-9/11 relationship between the two cultures broadly referred to as the East and the West, the Muslim world and America. What can be concluded about this exchange from the perspective of Hamid, a Pakistani English-language writer educated in America? What is the power relation between his two characters? What is the effect of the formal technique he employed and how does it correspond with Western literary tradition? The paper focuses on these questions, examining another dialogue between The Reluctant Fundamentalist and two works by renowned European authors, Antonio Tabucchi and Albert Camus.