Manifestations of Suspense in Mohammad Al-Gharbi Imran’s Novel Confabulation with the Dead

Abstract

This research seeks to monitor the manifestations of suspense in Imran’s novel Confabulation with the Dead, in order to examine its nature and connotations in the text and to define its patterns, in addition to examining its aesthetics. The study consists of three sections: the first: is manifestations of suspense in textual thresholds, the second: is patterns of suspense, and the third: is the aesthetics of suspense. The research took the structural and semiotic approaches as a way to address the studied phenomenon, and it reached a number of results, the most important of which is that the connotations of suspense have been revealed at various levels, between the direct and indirect methods. The element of suspense was not without its reliance on art, as the image of nature contained in the context of descriptive suspense represented a movement that pushed the recipient to contemplate it, which achieved - at the level of narrative structure - more than one function. Suspense also took two paths in the text. The first was close to the recipient’s memory when it was drawn by the scenes of the novel to trace the antecedents and consequences of its events, and the second was internal when it was close to the characters of the text, which was indicated by the emotions of the characters within the text.