The Reluctant Fundamentalist inscribes these features in the experiences of Changez, whose overall story punctures the notion of an easily identifiable “us and them” and whose sense of identity fluctuates throughout the novel. From early endeavors to submerge his “Third World” sensibility and identify completely with the sleek world of global capitalism, Changez performs a volte face—his eyes having been opened by the Chilean publisher Juan Bautista—and ends up seemingly ensconced in a Pakistani identity that defines itself explicitly against America and its imperial policies around the globe. However, the first half of the book works directly against any such thing as an essential identity as this chameleon takes on the hue of his environment. As his perspective changes, he comes to observe that “my Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by my suit, my expense account, and—most of all—by my companions” (71). Yet even this observation may not indicate a belated discovery of “true” identity. Later, thinking back on his failed romance with Erica, during which he acted out the part of her dead boyfriend during sex, he concedes: “I lacked a stable core.… Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile” (148, emphasis in original). Finally, in a semisurreal scene in which he fantasizes the presence of his now long lost love with him on the streets in Lahore, he confesses to being “transported”—a word conjuring the idea of a dream as much as any geographical movement: “Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us” (173–74).

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 454