Immigration, Fathers, and Sons Theme Analysis

“My Son the Fanatic” explores the ways in which the father-son relationship is further complicated by the internal and external pressures of immigration and the desire to assimilate. Parvez is a first-generation immigrant whose opportunities have been limited. He works tirelessly in a blue-collar profession as a taxi driver in order to provide for his son, Ali, and guarantee that Ali experiences upward mobility. Many fathers’ dreams are wrapped up in the success of their children, and the story captures how such dreams can be even more powerful for immigrants, who see their own assimilation as reaching its fruition through their children. By the end of the story, though, Ali has veered completely off the path that his father created for him, and this departure destroys their relationship as father and son. Through this implosion, Kureishi highlights how the pressure that first-generation immigrant fathers put on their sons to fulfill their dreams of assimilation can backfire and cause their second-generation children to, instead, attempt to reclaim the culture and identity that is lost when immigrants start life over in a new country. 

Initially, Parvez is confident that his academically and socially successful son, Ali, will realize his—Parvez’s—dreams of full assimilation into English culture. However, this confidence is shaken when Ali starts behaving strangely. As Ali begins to mysteriously throw away his possessions, though, Parvez becomes deeply worried and feels “his son’s eccentricity as an injustice” after all the hard work and sacrifice he’s made to provide Ali with everything he needs for a successful life in England. Parvez wants to confide in his friends—fellow Pakistani taxi drivers—but is ashamed and afraid to admit that his son may be falling victim to the “pitfalls” of “bad girls, truanting from school and joining gangs” that they’ve seen ruin other men’s sons. Parvez experiences his son’s “failures” as something shameful, showing that he sees his own success at assimilation as tied up in his son’s success.

When he discovers that Ali’s strange behavior has nothing to do with drugs, though, and is rather due to his newfound devotion to a fundamentalist version of Islam, Parvez is not at all relieved. Instead, Parvez desperately attempts to get his son back on the carefully constructed path to assimilation that Parvez had set for him. Parvez responds to the revelation that Ali has been praying by wanting to confront him about his sudden interest in religion, because he senses that it directly conflicts with Parvez’s goal of assimilating into English culture. The confrontation, however, is disastrous: Parvez discovers that Ali has adopted fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and is staunchly opposed to Western culture and society. Ali is fanatical enough that he is willing to give his life to jihad in order that the “Law of Islam would rule the world” and to stop the persecution of Muslims worldwide. Parvez is deeply disturbed, and feels that he’s “lost” his son. Parvez is realizing that his dreams for assimilation that depended on Ali are slipping away.

By the end of the story, it is clear that rather than actually leading to assimilation, Parvez’s desire for and attempts to achieve assimilation have driven Ali in the opposite direction. In a last attempt to reason with Ali, Parvez sits down to explain his personal philosophy of life in hopes that his son will be amenable to his view of the world and finally give up on his fundamentalist beliefs. Parvez explains that he believes one’s life ends completely after death, and therefore the only way for a person to live on is through their children and the future generations to come. With this point, Parvez is expressing to Ali that his own hopes and dreams for success and full assimilation into English culture can only be realized through Ali. Parvez’s philosophy, moreover, is one of individual success that explicitly rejects any idea of heaven. At this point in the conversation, Ali responds that he can’t enjoy life because “all over the world our people are oppressed.” Ali’s embrace of all Muslim people as his own marks a complete reversal from his father’s views of life. Ali experiences his father’s efforts at assimilation as having cut him off from his past and culture, and so he embraces that culture as the core of his identity. The story shows that Ali’s reaction is extreme, though: the fact that Parvez has no idea what Ali means when he says “our people” reveals that Ali’s attempt to reclaim his Islamic Pakistani heritage is disconnected from the actual reality of the culture of his parents who were actually born and raised in Pakistan. The extremity of Ali’s shift in worldview suggests that it is driven as much by a rejection of his father and his father’s goals as it is by anything else.

In the dramatic final scene of the story, Parvez finally accepts that Ali is “unreachable,” and that his departure from the carefully constructed path to full assimilation is final. Parvez has now become one of the fathers he used to pity because they could not prevent their second-generation sons from falling victim to the “pitfalls” of life in England. Parvez’s subsequent physical attack on Ali is, in a sense, an attack on the destroyer of his dream of assimilation. That the failed dream leads to such an attack speaks to the pressures of immigration and assimilation, and how that pressure is magnified when such dreams become tied up in relationships between father and son.