However, because there is no space outside this market for the modern author who seeks an international readership, the text is able only to point to its circumscribed position, not to transcend it. The result is what Geoffrey Nash has called The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s “purposive ambiguity”: “operating entirely within a western discourse it mounts a guarded resistance on behalf of the precariously placed stranger while still making overtures of reason to an audience he [Hamid] perhaps wishes to placate.”

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory conversations about the constraints of writing for Western audiences while representing the subaltern or 'stranger'.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 443