The framing of selfless role-playing in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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ABSTRACT In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the concept of identity comes undone because the narrator-protagonist, confronted with his lack of belonging, resorts to role-playing as a means of feeling whole. Undertaken in order to heal the self, role-playing plays out in the sense of playacting and responsibility. Although critics have commented on the novel’s deconstruction of belonging, the dual sense of role-playing has not been analysed in terms of how it affects the selflessness responsibility involves. This paper explores the text’s implication of responsibility in playacting, with respect to how this entanglement opens onto a negative depiction of selflessness. The 9/11 novel’s grim take on selflessness, which ties in with its focus on terror, is shown to undercut the ethical value that deracination bears in Jacques Derrida’s readings of responsibility.