The Alchemy of Violence in John Updike’s Novel Terrorist (2006): A Story of A Boy in Between, and A Terrorist at Last.

Abstract

The present paper addresses the issue of America’s domestic violence within a context of global concern over terrorism in John Updike’s novel Terrorist (2006). The analysis considers elucidating the problematic dynamics of violence whose alchemy tells much of the uses of violence in American literature with a traditional literary and cultural tendency towards hegemonism. The main objective is to highlight the novel’s tragic story of a boy’s development going wrong whose tragedy is highly expressed through Ahmad’s unfortunate lot, being “a boy in between” understood as the outgrowth of an enduring historical mutual misunderstanding between Christianity and Islam; and between the West as represented by Ahmad’s mother and the Arab Muslim World as represented by Ahmad’s absent father. Ahmad’s fatherlessness and rootlessness along with his American-lessness is an allegory of unwilling compromise between two opposite and conflicting worlds, the West vs. the Orient. It is precisely this unsettling dilemma that ultimately gives full meaning to not simply what Ahmad is meant to be, but also to what the novel aims at: highlighting Ahmad’s relentless commitment towards achieving his personal freedom as an American Muslim whose destiny through violence illustrates his willingness to become a man.