Social Identity Construction in Migration Narrative: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the construction of social identity in the migration narrative of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) with a special focus on the engagement of text with the identity construction by using tools of textual conceptual functions from Lesley Jefferie’s Critical Stylistics (2010) for codification and Laclau and Mouffe’s Political Discourse Theory (2010). This study explores the ways that how the migrant characters engage with these concepts and how their representation destabilizes the dominant and traditional meaning of identity. For the migrant protagonists in Exit West (2017), the notion of identity is not strictly defined in relation to their place of origin or to any affiliation with a particular place. In other words, the narrative in the text is centered on the fact that although the migrants initially define identity in strict association to their homeland or place of origin, this subsequently changes as they move out of their city of birth and encounter various places and cultures. In the Findings section, this study shows the identity issues of the migrant characters and their problems in social spheres.