Credit: nytimes.com

Rewrite the Reluctant Fundamentalist from the perspective of a character outside the narrator’s/speaker’s/camera’s purview. Your writing should be based on the work’s depiction of that character, both what the work sees and what it fails to. Here are a few questions you should address as you write your answer:

1) How does the work in question depict the character you’ve chosen? Do you trust the work’s understanding of that character? Or has the work—intentionally or not—missed something crucial about them (perhaps with respect to their motivations and their desires, or their interior life generally)?


2) How does thinking from the perspective of this character reframe, perhaps even transform, the original narrative? What do they know about the situation that the other characters do not or cannot? And might this character inform us about the work’s other characters?

3) Does seeing the world from the perspective of this character influence the way you write, or the formal/rhetorical choices you make?