Framing travel and terrorism: Allegory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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Abstract
In contrast to others who have read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist exclusively as a political novel, I argue that the novel’s most significant contribution to the body of post-9/11 literature is formal in nature. The novel indeed mobilizes political issues, but it achieves this by creating a series of allegories that centre on various forms of travel connected to the terrorism hinted at in the term “fundamentalist” in the title. These allegories, which I examine in the first part of this article, revolve around the interactions between the protagonist and those he encounters as he travels: the hosts and guests in the travel interactions function as allegories of different nations, and the relationships between nations within global space. However, while the novel’s travel allegories indeed raise political concerns, these are often conflicted and ambiguous owing to the unreliability of the narrator. Rather than selecting one of the unreliable perspectives brought forth by the travel allegories as “true”, I read them as part of a larger meta-allegorical project in which the narrative itself becomes an allegory of the uncertainties of the post-9/11 environment. In the second part of this article, I discuss this meta-allegorical project through an examination of the novel’s narrative structure, particularly its frame narrative which, I argue, provides a means for Hamid to allegorically explore the ways that permeable borders engender paranoia and fear of terrorism in the post-9/11 context.