Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

The existence of literature becomes a part of human life since the civilization and human culture appears in this world. According to Sapardi Djoko Damono, Sastra adalah lembaga sosial yang menggunakan bahasa sebagai medium; bahasa itu sendiri merupakan ciptaan sosial. 1 Literature is social institution that using the languange as the media; languange is social idea. Technically, anything spoken or written is literature. There are some kinds of types of literature as the art of work, such as: poetry, prose, short story, fiction, play or and novel. 2 The novel is one of the literature works. It falls into narrative categories, fiction story. The word “novel” usually means something new – novelty. Some of the earliest novel, written in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, would have been just that. Some of the modern novels have different definition. The Oxford dictionary describes a novel as a fictitious narrative prose or tale presenting a picture of a real life, especially of the emotional crises in the life-story of the men and women being portrayed. 3 Another dictionary, Longman, describes a novel as a story in prose about imaginary people long enough to cover a book, or as an 1 Sapardi Djoko Damono, Sosiologi Sastra Sebuah Pengantar Ringkas,Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1984, p.1 2 C. Alton, Morris, Biron Walker, Philip, Bradshaw, Imaginative Literature Fiction, Drama, Poetry, USA: Harcourt, Brace Inc, 1968, p. 114 3 A S Hornby. Oxford Advance Learners’ Dictionary, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.792 1 imaginative storybook. 4 Novel was a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, portraying characters, action, and scene representative of real life in a plot of more or less intrigue. 5 One thing readers need to keep in mind is that there are two main attitudes or positions that the readers can take when studying a novel. The first attitude they can hold that what important is the content or the word which the author has created. This is a world that the readers can see people, places, things, and events, to which they respond with like or dislike, pity or criticism, as the reader do to the real world. Studying from this position, the readers will discuss the characters almost as if they were being with ability to choose their actions. 6 The second position is that readers can see the novel as a ‘text’, as a created work of art, and to look at it in much more detached and analytical way. Characters are devices, which the author uses and manipulates to create a particular effect. Studying with this attitude, the readers will be more likely to consider what a character’s role is in the construction of a plot, or the effect of using particular language to describe a place or person. 7 Furthermore, in studying fiction, the readers will know the aspects of the fiction, such as theme, plot, character, setting, and narrative point of view. These aspects are called intrinsic elements. The intrinsic elements are very 4 Pearson Longman. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Great Britain: Longman Group, 1987, p.706 5 Steven Croft and Helen Cross, Literature, Criticism, and Style, New York: Oxford, 1997, Vol.1, p.7 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. important in the fiction story, to describe a story, make a story come to life. Besides, the readers have also to understand the background of the author and the social background where the story has been created, these are called extrinsic elements. Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore. He attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and worked as a management consultant in New York and London. He now writes full-time as the author of two novels; Moth Smoke2000 as his first novel and The Reluctant Fundamentalist2007 as his second novel, living between Lahore where he was born and other places, including New York and London. 8 Changez as a main character in The Reluctan Fundamentalis novel, a Pakistani tries to find new life and he decides to go to America to study then he graduates from Princeton University with the best grade and then he works at a financial firm in Manhattan as a consultant. He slowly becomes radicalized by Americas response to the 911 attacks. This novel is told by monolog style. He sees an American in the district of Old Anarkali in Lahore and invites him to have tea and then dinner with him in one of the establishments there. For the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening Changez recounts how he came to be the man he now is, from graduating from Princeton and landing a great job to once again living in Lahore. The novel is briskly told in 184 pages. Hamid tells the story in first person point of view, with Changez as the narrator and the reader in the position of 8 http:www.mohsinhamid.comshortbio.html accessed on March 9, 2011 at 05:13 am the operative. Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?p.1 it begins. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. p.1 As his story unravels, it becomes clear that something terrible is going to happen between Changez and the American. Changez fights with his feelings to decide the difficult thing between to keep staying in America where he loves or to go back to his country although finally he opts to go back to Pakistan. We can see this is as an identity crisis and we can analyze it by using postcolonial theory which usually tries to understand the power and continued dominance of Western ways of knowing. 9 Nyoman Kutha Rama states that where there is domination, there is resistance. In the history of colonialism, the construction on non-European identity as the subordinate vis-à-vis the superiority of the European is disseminated in many mode of thought and knowledge about the other, including literature. As part of the history of decolonization, the native writers reacted in opposition to these representations, by writing themselves about their own identity and culture. Many of them were educated in the language and culture of the colonizers. 10 Therefore, in this paper, the writer chose this novel entitled The Reluctant Fundamentalist written by Mohsin Hamid. Then the writer tries to analyze the causes of identity crisis which arouses in the main character who struggles with his feelings to decide whether he still stays in America or goes back to 9 Ania Loomba,1998. ColonialismPostcolonialism. Great Britain: London and New York Routledge, pp. xvi, 16-17, 21, 34-35, 48 10 Nyoman Kutha Ratna. 2005. Sastra dan Cultural Studies: Repsentasi Fiksi dan Fakta, Yogyakarta: PUstaka Pelajar, pp.238-240 his country Pakistan which he loves them both. It is important to study the novel because Pakistanis an ex-colonized country that has tried to find his own identity and in this novel it is portrayed by Changes as main character but he is trapped to the crisis identity, which one he must choose as reconstruction process of native identity after the long experience of colonization. To answer this, the writer uses postcolonial approach to understand the novel comprehensively.

B. Focus of the Study