Annabelle Sreberny has observed how in this essay Amis employs the personal pronoun we in different ways, sometimes to signal a personal opinion—“we would hope the [U.S.] response will be, above all, non-escalatory” (9)—and at other times to indicate or try to engender Western cultural solidarity: “What are we to do?” (9). In each case, however, the effect is to delineate between perpetrators and victims, Islam and the West. … Sreberny remarks wryly: “That individual pieces of writing should echo the dominant political frames of the day is perhaps not a surprise; but ‘we’ (academics) don’t often get a chance to see this happening so clearly.”

XREF: Connects to narratology and rhetorical analysis of authorial voice and reader positioning.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 96