这部小说Exit West由Mohsin Hamid撰写，讲述了许多人将其放置在Hamid后来使用两个主要角色的环境中所经历的战争，移民和本土主义的严厉现实：Saeed和Nadia。主要角色陷入了深深而复杂的爱情，与激进分子接管他们的城市相比。在所有这些方面，他们试图理解他们的关系的细微差别，同时也学习适应曾经爱的家中崩溃的战区。传言通过通往遥远城市的门逃脱的谣言到达了赛义德，而纳迪亚的耳朵开始逃脱。
Hamid uses their story of migration to educate the reader of the circumstances that change individuals when they are forced to migrate to the West. Hamid builds a plot surrounding relevant global issues while still keeping some of the seemingly major details out of the story. With the discussion of immigration, refugees, faith, and the controversial fight between the nativists and the migrants,Exit Westremains in the dark about any specific issue.
There is never a formal country orreligion that is established in the novel for the main characters, which makes the novel more ambiguous to the reader. The vagueness of the region, language, and religion help with the overall message of the refugee experience, additionally it helps the reader create a multitude of interpretations about the text itself.
The relationship between the two characters, Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love in the midst of the collapse of their city, helps build a contrast to the environment around them. Hamid uses this relationship to highlight how the characters and their lives change throughout the novel because of the events happening around them. The quote spoken by the narrator that states, “It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town. . . . Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians…” describes the apartment that Saeed and his parents lived in (Hamid 13).
这句话强调了暴力和战争的力量，最终将心爱的地方摧毁到危险领域。In essence, what the historian and realtor say about this place is very similar, the realtor takes time to focus on the enjoyment of the clientele, while this historian reminisces on the location’s effect with the remembrance of the past, where there was a negative connotation to the location. Slowly throughout the novel, Hamid makes Saeed and Nadia’s town from a busy city to a complete warzone that requires an escape. An example of this concept would be when Nadia and Saeed come across an abandoned shopping mall where they meet the agent that is going to take them out of their city, both Saeed and Nadia agreed that this meeting was terrifying. We can deduce that before their city was overtaken by militants, the mall would have never been considered inherently dangerous or nerve-wracking.
The quote also foreshadows how experiences and time change how Saeed and Nadia relate to their surroundings and each other. When they were choosing a place to live when they arrived through the door at the London house, their primary focus was to find a room that had an escape route rather than finding a room based on their personal preferences. Their conceptualization about how safe places have the potential to become dangerous provided them with a similar view to the historian’s view of their new home. They approach the London ‘safe’ house with the same skeptic ideology that it can become unsafe very quickly. As their preferences for safety changed, so did their view of each other, both Saeed and Nadia found that the things that they had liked about each other in their native city became lost in translation after having an extremely stressful time migrating.
这一变化的一个例子是，赛义德对纳迪的保守派着装以及她对宗教的固执看法的印象。最初，他发现这种对比很有吸引力，但是随着时间的流逝，他认为她将继续以“盾牌”为“盾牌”以外的传统敷料。他认为纳迪亚是真诚的，因为这提醒赛义德，纳迪亚从来都不对他们的城市文化完全满意。如果没有他们从城镇中迁移，这种变化很可能永远不会被注意到。在小说的早期，赛义德的父亲拒绝“穿过门”，并与赛义德（Saeed）和纳迪亚（Nadia）一起迁移”。。但这就是事物的方式，因为当我们迁移时，我们从生活中谋杀了那些我们留下的人。”
纳迪亚（Nadia）对拒绝与他们一起迁移的事实感到沮丧，但是叙述者后来为赛义德（Saeed）父亲的话增加了深度，因为随后移民的牺牲被这些词语强调了。迁移并不是轻易完成的事情，因为那些迁移的人的身份由于迁移对人的影响而完全不同（Hamid 60）。赛义德（Saeed）的父亲似乎一直在暗示出生主义的想法，在那里，当地居民的价值观被置于移民的人的价值观面前。赛义德（Saeed）的父亲虽然严峻，但宁愿牺牲自己的生命，而不是他的文化和价值观。
Mohsin Hamid的Exit West很好地描绘了移民过程和本土主义的袭击如何影响不仅两个主要角色Saeed和Nadia的关系，而且还会影响任何被迫从本地地区迁移的人口。复杂的特征使人们对讨论迁移时通常会忽略的多层体验有帮助，因为与西方社会共享的新闻报道。
Most of the stories people hear about, mainly discuss the actual warzones themselves versus these complex themes that Hamid presents to his audience, such as creating this complex idea of having his characters struggle with feeling at home in a foreign country whilst battling the hard idea that returning to their native land is no longer an option. Hamid’s usage of juxtaposition between the beautiful and the horrid makes the novel an excellent text for the modern reader to feel connected with the global issues surrounding migration and in that proving the main goal of the novel,向西出口。
