Accelerating the Narration in the Novels of Sinan Antoon Summarizing and Deleting

Abstract

This research deals with an important topic of the narrative techniques in the fictional text in general and the novel text in particular, which is the acceleration of the narrative time and its distinctive techniques. The paper offers an extensive study of the works of the Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon – a poet, novelist and an academic – who published a volume of poetry “A Prism saturated with War” and four novels: I’Jaam, Alone is a Pomegranate Tree, Ya Maryam which was nominated for the Arab Poker Prize and reached the shortlist in 2012, and Fahrs (index). The research is divided into two sections preceded by an introduction to the main movements of narrative time and focuses on two techniques that are relate to acceleration of the narration, and their prominent role in overcoming the problems that any novelist may face to cope with the real time of the story. The two techniques contribute to form the structure of the text in the selected novels of the study and reveal the author’s ability to handle the element of time after removing the impurities of dead time in the events of his novels. The first section entitled "Summarization", in which the researcher studied this technique, showing its role in accelerating the narration in his novels. The second section dealt with the technique of "deletion" in which the researcher highlighted its prominent functions, as well as its important role in accelerating the narrative time to enable the writer to control the course of the events of his novels.