Exit West Summary and Analysis

Chapters 1-2 Summary

In an unnamed city, Saeed and Nadia meet and begin dating. Saeed keeps his beard short. Nadia wears a black robe to protect herself from unwanted advances.

The day after they meet, Saeed watches a hawk build a nest and thinks of Nadia. Simultaneously, a man in Australia emerges from a closet door into a bedroom where a woman with a tattoo of a mythological bird sleeps. The man swiftly exits through a window. Later, Saeed picks up bread to bring home to the apartment where he lives with his parents. The narrator says that this is the last year of their lives.

On their second date, Saeed and Nadia discuss where they’d like to travel to most. Both want to visit Latin America. Nadia invites Saeed back to her apartment and tells him she does not intend to sleep with him. Nadia lives alone. She is estranged from her family, who disowned her after she decided not to marry. To sneak past the widow who owns the building, Nadia throws Saeed a black robe from her window on the third floor. While they share a joint, a man in Tokyo drinks Irish whiskey. Later, he follows two Filipina girls down the street while touching a piece of metal in his pocket.

The narrator comments on how violence becomes tangible to a person when it happens to someone they know intimately. Nadia experiences this when her cousin is blown “to bits” by a truck bomb.

The narrator recounts Nadia’s relationship with a musician. He is the first man she had sex with, but she breaks up him with because of her relationship with Saeed. In a few short months, the narrator says, the musician will be dead.

The next night, helicopters appear in the sky “like birds startled by a gunshot,” and a young soldier from the countryside emerges from a doorway into the city.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

A contrast between peace and violence appears immediately in Exit West. Chapter 1 begins with a bird building a nest, while Chapter 2 ends with the imagery of birds startled by gunshot. Throughout the novel, cycles of construction and destruction mirror the cycles of peace and violence. A bird motif supports this theme. Here the bird builds; at the story’s end, birds will lose their homes.

As the novel progresses, tensions arise between fundamentalist and Western values. Saeed and Nadia, the only characters who have proper names, come to illustrate this dichotomy. However, they are much more alike than not at the novel’s beginning, and many parallels draw them together, such as both wanting to travel to Latin America.

To orient readers, author Mohsin Hamid introduces the magical doorways right away. The narrative never returns to the secondary characters who emerge from these doors, although readers might be curious to find out what happens to them. Hamid uses them instead to show how people lose touch. The omniscient narrator sets an ominous tone, telling readers that many characters will soon die. The presence of the narrator is yet another reminder that the story is not meant to be “real” but, rather, to construct emotional and political truths from a series of fictions.