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Exit West Essay

613 Words3 Pages

Mohsin Hamid explores the desperate plight of a pair of refugee lovers in Exit West. He theorizes a world with a new layer of connection with the mysterious doors, as well as how a relationship can progress under the strain of being a homeless refugee. Through the eyes of the seemingly inseparable pair, the book explains what happens when a college pair exits west in the literal sense. What makes Exit West hit close to home is because Saeed and Nadia seem like relatively ordinary people, people I could walk side by side with on my way to class and have no second thoughts about them standing out. They live in a city in which they are free to educate themselves, eat what they want, have a sexual relationship, and smoke marijuana. I think Hamid meant for the city to seem like a regular American city, so the reader is able to identify with the protagonist’s struggle; it seems as if Saeed and Nadia are …show more content…

The world is affected by these new connections in a catastrophic manner; people from many different cultures spew out of these doors into relatively privileged societies, and xenophobia begins to take hold as the refugees’ presence demands an ever-growing amount of resources. At the end of chapter six, when the locals reach the tipping point and decide to use potentially violent means to get rid of all the refugees in the London camps, at the time of action they couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. I think this 180 degree resolution is indicative of the author’s belief that when the choice between good and extreme evil absolutely has to be made, there won’t be someone to pull the trigger, even when all it would take for the others to follow is one shot. The action of putting aside differences to find a solution for the common good by building “Halo Cities” is all the more proof that the author believes in the ability of society to do great

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