A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

Abstract

The aim of this study is to make a stylistic analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, using the analytic model developed by Geoffrey Leech and Mike Short (1981) as the major approach. To facilitate this, the study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter mainly involves the background of the study, the statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions and the methodology of the study. The second chapter mainly discusses review of related literature and theoretical framework. Chapter three is the analysis part in which selected chapters from the novel are analyzed and chapter four is the conclusion where it summarizes the major findings. Most theses that have used stylistic analysis are based on certain poem or short stories and much work has not been done applying stylistic analysis to novels, according to the observation made. Thus, this work tries to apply stylistic analysis on a novel and shows how one can better understand writer’s use of different literary elements and how meanings are constructed in a specific novel. The novel is written after the incident of 9/11, thus making it politically and socially important. A great deal of work has been done on its political aspect, but linguistically it has not yet been studied. Therefore I took this work for my Masters of philosophy dissertation. To give some of the major findings of this study, the writer uses more nouns as compared to other word class, i.e. adjectives, verbs and adverbs. The major figures of speech used in grammatical and lexical schemes are repetition and parallelism. In the rhetorical device, similes, allegory and metaphor have been used sparingly. Keywords: Repetition, Parallelism, Similes, Metaphor and Allegory.