Heterotopias and Changez's Fractured Self in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

What happens to one's identity when moving between contrasting cultures? Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores this tension through Changez - a Pakistani migrant seeking his fortune in New York who gets caught in seismic personal and political ruptures post-9/11. As Changez’s world fractures between walls of wealth and violence, so too does his sense of self. The Foucauldian lens of “heterotopia” has been applied in this paper to investigate the junctions in the novel where Changez enters fluid in-between zones that break rules and reorder norms. Whether the shifting terrain of immigrant work, elite social bubbly parties, or his own yearning hallucinations about a vanished lover, Changez continually reinvents and loses himself between competing worlds. Textual analysis has been employed as the research method in this paper to explore the various perspectives. Just as the story resists singular interpretation, protagonist Changez drifts between models of selfhood - now fundamentalist, now fully assimilated, now financier, now revolutionary. His very name a paradox, Changez’s mutable identity proves as reluctant, contradictory, and complex as the fractures of history and consciousness his journey unveils.