By empathizing with the Other, John Updike attempted imaginative constructions of the terrorist’s perspectives to get out of the dilemma. What is striking about the explorations of the terrorist Ahmad’s mind is the way that the boundary between victims and perpetrators blurs together. The binary opposition between They the terrorist and We the America seems to be dissolved, too. But Jack’s self-identity is constructed through the construction of the Other——Ahmad and a wider circle of the binary opposition between Self, i.e. Judeo-Christian American ideology, and Other, i.e. American Islam, appears.