I would argue yet another level of complication is introduced into Nafisi's text by the canonical English and American novels it interpolates and comments upon. While lending a further aura of authority, these borrowings point up shortcomings in the rather narrow, judgmental perspective the narrator-teacher displays. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic ambiguity or transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological message.

XREF: Relates to broader debates about how intertextual borrowing functions rhetorically in memoir and political writing, and how literary devices can work against an author's stated intent.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 217