السّرد الغرائبي في مجموعة القمر المربّع لغادة السّمّان

Abstract

    The human experience has received great attention from writers who have sought to comprehend it and express it through their stories—stories that contain anguished characters and portray diverse places and times. The study of the fantastic in Ghada Al-Samman’s collection The Square Moon falls within this context, as it clarifies the manifestations of psychological suffering and its impact on a character’s behavior and on their perception of time, which becomes intertwined in their consciousness so that the past appears alongside the future and the present.

    At the descriptive level, the fantastic story presents highly diverse and strange worlds, owing to its depiction of these worlds from an internal, conflicted perspective. Its tool for doing so is a highly varied language that attempts to exploit multiple connotations in order to convey this unique and peculiar experience to the reader with precision—and here lies the significance of the study.

    As for the methodology employed, the study adopted the psychological approach. The study concluded with several findings, the most prominent of which is that the manifestation of the fantastic in modern fiction is a natural result of the series of transformations that the individual has found themselves subjected to. The fragmentation of time in these stories is closely linked to the anxious self, and language—throughout all of this—proved to be the most effective means of expressing the specificity of the experience and conveying it to the reader.