Hanif Kureishi: Short Stories

Hanif Kureishi: Short Stories Analysis

The Assault

The woman in “The Assault” bears a Compulsive Talking Personality Disorder. The narrator illuminates, “When I turn to her and mouth some comforting words, I begin to see that the woman has no interest in my response, that there is nothing she wants from me. I only have to be here, a person, that's all.” The woman is not intent on soliciting consolation from her listener. All that she desires is someone to be audience to her interminable chatter. Conceivably, it is the obsessive craving to discourse that provokes her decision to lift the narrator so that she can be warranted a reachable listener.

The woman has not discerned that her eccentric mannerism is a personality ailment that has claustrophobic ramifications. Perhaps, she would need to be analyzed for the reason that her illnesses and her son’s disorder could be connected. If the woman treats her son in the same way that she treats the narrator, then the son is destined to come upon mental issues. Therefore, an ideal diagnosis would explicate the cause-effect association between the woman’s obsessive talking and her son’s disquieting mental illness.

“My Son is a Fanatic”

“My Son is a Fanatic” validates that fundamentalism can be as detrimental as drug abuse. When Parvez divulges to his associates about Ali’s inexplicable transformation, they speculate, “All was taking drugs and selling his possessions to pay for them.” However, their theory is unseemly because he bestows the items to charities. Although Ali does not accommodate drug use, the extremist mind-set that he takes up alters his life unfavorably. What is more, Ali is radicalized while in England. Ordinarily, the radicalization would have been uncomplicated in Lahore owing to the extensiveness of radicalism there. Clearly, radicalism is not delimited by geographical frontiers. Ali’s radicalization impedes his father’s hopes for the ‘England dream.’

Extremism heightens the adherents' revulsion towards societal and religious troupes that are deemed to be disparaging the Koran. Ali proclaims, “The Law of Islam would rule the world; the skin of the infidel would bum off again and again; the Jews and Christers would be routed. The West was a sink of hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, drug takers and prostitutes.” Ali accept as true that the nonconformists in the west ought to be demolished because of their depravities. Ali’s radical outlook is archetypal among fanatical individuals who have been proselytized to believe that “The Law of Islam” should be the unqualified law in the whole world for it is superlative and it sanction religiosity. The Chaos Theory would endorse that the discordance between fanaticism and civilization elicits perpetual disarray.

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