Narrative Control and Michiavellian Rhetoric: Changez as a Modern Iago in the Reluctant Fundamentalist

This paper explores how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist engages with Shakespearean Machiavellianism by reimagining Iago’s rhetorical mastery and strategic deception in Othello. While Iago manipulates perception to engineer Othello’s downfall, Changez employs a similarly calculated ambiguity, not for personal nihilism but as an ideological assertion against Western hegemony. Through a close reading of both texts, this study examines how narrative control, dual identities, and pragmatic betrayal function as mechanisms of power. Drawing upon Machiavelli’s The Prince, the analysis highlights how Changez, like Iago, refuses resolution, leaving both his interlocutor and the reader suspended in interpretive uncertainty. Unlike Iago, whose silence reinforces destruction, Changez’s ambiguity becomes an act of defiant self-representation. In positioning Changez as a modern, ideological Iago, The Reluctant Fundamentalist transforms Shakespearean Machiavellianism into a tool of postcolonial resistance, revealing how narrative authority can challenge dominant geopolitical structures.