A Psychoanalytic Approach to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

Literature has always been considered as the reflection of human life because of its involvement with human behavior, thoughts, activity, development, progress, etc. Sometimes while reading a literary text, readers often face complicated characters that are quite troublesome and create difficulty to understand but at the same time, these characters generate curiosity in the mind of the readers to know more about them. Such a character is Changez from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This article aims to explain the behavior of Changez, the protagonist of the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist who narrates and shares his experiences about his time in America to an American stranger. To analyze his personality, this paper uses the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. This paper upholds psychological pressure and its consequence on Changes as an individual who faces a sudden and unexpected social change in America. All the methods that are applied to conduct this paper are the qualitative method and the analytic descriptive method. Finally, this study serves a relation between psychoanalysis and literature.