In the Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez, the protagonist, faces an acute crisis of identity, as he struggles to juggle and grapple with the different components of his being to understand who he really is. In my drawing, I’ve attempted to represent the influences on each distinct facet of his being through the people and places they derive from pulling on the hollowed out core of his physical body with ropes, giving a visual representation of Changez’s own epiphanal words

“…I did not know where I stood on so many issues of consequence; I lacked a stable core. I was not certain where I belonged-In New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither- and for this reason, when she reached out to me for help, I had nothing of substance to give her. Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile.

In the drawing, Lahore represents Changez’s longing for his childhood home, the food, tea, culture, and identity with which he grew up and the comforts, emotional and material, it conferred. Similarly, his family represents the pull of duty and filial obligation, to not only aid them financially but to protect them in a time of increasing military tension.

The Statue of Liberty represents both Changez’s pre-9/11 feeling of being immediately included and welcomed as a New Yorker, and his post-9/11 automatic categorization as the dangerous “other”. On the mainland, Jim represents the pull of the competitive, professional, “hungry” side of Changez, eager to correct the decline of his family’s financial and social status by replicating Jim’s ascent from being the son of working-class American parents to owning a house in the Hamptons. Similarly, the “P” of Princeton represents Changez’s desire to blend in with the elites, being a “prince” who never appears to exert himself whilst still achieving at the highest level. Meanwhile, Underwood Samson, captured by a grey, callous skyscraper, and its unerring focus on efficiency and the “fundamentals,” represents the cold, machine-like precision of Changez’s mind in dealing with problems, valuation or otherwise, abandoning emotion just as his workplace does.

These two groups of influences are visually separated by encapsulating each in their respective geographic localizations, America (further symbolized by the overlaying of the American flag on the map) or Pakistan, representing Changez’s unfulfilled desire to have both his Western and Eastern components of himself successfully fuse together.

And most importantly, above all other influences is Erica, the only influence Changez actively pulls towards, representative of the love he could never have because of a memory that wouldn’t fade. Without her, Changez lost the majority of what remained of his connection to America, because in some metaphorical sense Erica was America post-9/11, trapped by an unforgettable, tragic memory to the point of being unable to connect with essences foreign to itself. One can only hope that upon resettling back home, Changez was able to at last find his core.