Escaping the Inescapable: Cognitive Dissonance in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012)

Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012) dramatizes the journey of a Muslim Pakistani-American protagonist inside the post-9/11 American society attempting to gain complete fulfillment in it by assimilating to the mainstream culture and turning his back on his Islamic cultural heritage. Through this pursuit, however, he falls prey to a nagging sense of cognitive dissonance, that is to say inconsistency between his behaviour and belief. Superficially, Amir claims a secular American identity, yet deep within he still yearns for his true Islamic Eastern one. Such a sense of dissonance causes a state of psychological discomfort that requires immediate action to reduce it; therefore, the hero resorts to defense mechanisms, denial and rationalization, to get rid of his dualism and its accompanying sense of uneasiness. However, the exaggerated use of these defenses drifts him into a world of illusion in which he imagines himself a full American though in reality he remains a mere ethnic Other. Towards the end of the drama, however, two unexpected incidents violently shake the illusionary world of the protagonist and get his consciousness back to him. This paper critically hypothesizes, then, that Disgraced revolutionizes the consciousness of the audience by removing the masks that blind them to seeing the truth of themselves and their status in the world as they discover through the story of Amir and his self-discovery journey in the United States that the right path towards self-consistency and social fulfilment lies in espousing one’s true identity and cultural heritage rather than assimilating to another alien culture and that one cannot escape one’s true self forever. For critically investigating this thesis, the researcher uses the psychological approach to literature with specific reference to Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. By exploiting this approach, the researcher aims to dig deep inside the psyche of the protagonist to uncover the reasons beyond his choice to conform, the justifications he provides for this decision, and his un/conscious preference for illusion over reality. In other words, the writer attempts to arrive at an understanding of what is going on inside the main character’s mind in his journey of self-discovery.