Building on R. L. Walkowitz’s notion of ‘born translated’ novel, this study investigates the politics of narrative form in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003). While the study traces major and minor differences between these two texts, it also demonstrates the existence of a set of common formal, structural, and thematic resemblances that relate these two otherwise incongruous texts together. Through the maneuvers of partial fluency, self-translation, and limited participation, both texts articulate the experience of alterity and difference and build them into the very form of the novel. The narrations are also meticulously organized. Hamid’s second-person narration deconstructs the colonial and imperial representations of the social interactions among the Euro-American and the non-Euro-American. By so doing, it alters the locus of the central and the peripheral and challenges the autonomy of the former. By convoluting an ‘eventful’ narrative through which to portray the lives and mentalities of ‘real’ Afghans, and by devising Amir as the literary agent through whose eyes to report the political turmoil of Afghanistan, Hosseini, on the other hand, tries to reform the negative image of Afghans as backward, fundamentalist Muslims propagated in mass media.
