“The Question of Identity in Abdulrahman Munif’s When We Left The Bridge”

Abstract

This article examines Abdulrahman Munif’s novel When We Left the Bridge (Indama Tarakna Al-Jisr) the agonizing life of the defeated soldier, Zeki Nadawi the protagonist, and the constant process of re-defining and re-thinking his identity. Zeki is depicted as trapped in a world of self-loathing and futility in a Darwinian existential naturalistic context. The author takes upon him the task of translating the quotations cited from the Arabic text into English to facilitate the task of the English reader. The article further highlights the similarities between Munif’s novel and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” in order to establish the modern aspects of Munif’s novel and the probable influence these works could’ve had upon Munif’s fiction. Keywords: Identity; Futility; Modernism; Comparative Lit