Point of View

Mohsin Hamid tells his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia in the second-person, omniscient perspective. The unnamed narrator of the self-help book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia narrates your life as a character in the novel reading the self-help book. It also directly addresses you as the reader becoming the character in the novel. You, as the reader, are directly addressed (as “you”), and you are directly addressed because Hamid wants his novel to resemble an overall story between a reader, a self-help book, and the reader’s life. This directly draws the reader in to the life of the reader of the self-help book, allowing you to experience firsthand the things the reader of the self-help book does. This also serves the point of breaking the fourth wall, in which the audience is directly addressed and personally invested...