Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| Related Characters Nadia Related Themes: Page Number 31 Explanation and Analysis Throughout roughly the first third of Exit West, Hamid crafts the gradual buildup of tension and violence as it slowly but surely overtakes Nadia and Saeed’s city. Because such dynamics develop overtime, though, it’s not always easy to fully understand how much a place and its people have been influenced by mounting violence. Hamid demonstrates this by showing Nadia’s sudden realization that things have taken a turn for the worse in her city. In times of violence,” he writes, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.” An important component of this sentence is the word “touched,” for it subtly implies a sense of progression, as if violence is passed along from person to person, “touch[ing]” one citizen at a time until it finally reaches somebody in Nadia’s circle of “acquaintance[s].” Furthermore, the fact that Nadia’s cousin is the first person she knows to die as a result of the militants presence is significant because it ultimately shows her that anybody and everybody—regardless of how much time they spend in the city—is in danger. After all, her cousin only visits his parents “once a year and this time simply had the misfortune of being blown […] to bits This is why Nadia feels like the “bad dream of violence in her city is “suddenly, evisceratingly real if such a thing can happen to her cousin, who is hardly ever even in the city, then it can certainly happen to her, since she lives her entire life amidst the violence and commotion. Chapter 3 Quotes Nadia and Saeed were, back then, always in possession of their phones. In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be. Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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