Moreover, the dramatic monologue enables us to see the world from Changez’s point of view, but what it prevents us from doing at all is finding out for sure about his American interlocutor. Who is he? Is he, as Changez seems to imply, an American agent sent to kill him? Or is he just a passing tourist who has chanced upon this restaurant in Lahore’s Old Anarkali district? We do not know. We are never told. And that is the point of the form. Its one-sidedness actually performs that archetypal novelistic trick of taking us inside the head of the character, but, in so doing, it refuses us the normalizing consolation of a dialogue. As a result, we find ourselves almost forced to respond in ways dictated by Changez; we become the uninstructed addressee, with all the agendas and prejudices our storyteller slyly suggests. Although a liberal Western reader may baulk at being asked to identify himself or herself with someone who may well be a cold-blooded CIA assassin, the novel suggests a continuum of assumptions working to normalize the Othering of Muslims, which include liberal complacency as surely as neoconservative antipathy.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 448