earticle

영어

Focusing on American/Western point of view and the impact of 9/11 on America(ns), most canonical 9/11 literature emphasizes the trauma suffered by “innocent” America(ns) and the unrepresentability of the event, ascribing the terrorists’ motivations to religion, Islam, while overlooking America’s long-standing political, military, and economic intervention in the Middle East. John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) tries to reject the dominant narrative. In his attempt to reject the popular representations of 9/11 and conceptualize the terrorists’ point of view, Updike creates an allegedly sympathetic homegrown terrorist, eighteen-year-old American-born Arab/Muslim Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy. However, Updike’s extremely apolitical Arab Muslim American protagonist can neither represent the conflicting social realities of the post-9/11 America he lives in nor offer the historical contexts underlying the attacks. Examining Updike’s representation of an apolitical and good Arab Muslim American terrorist, I explore how Terrorist ultimately reproduces and reinforces the dominant discourse of 9/11—the misplaced emphasis on the role of religion and the historical amnesia regarding the causes of the event.