Violence and the techniques of reflecting it in the novel “Indeed He Dreams or Plays or Dies "by Ahmad Saadawi

Over the past few decades, Iraq has experienced a bitter series of wars and miseries. A part of this history has been depicted in contemporary Arabic novels. These works of literature serve to display the realities and mysteries of the modern Iraqi man through narrations. Ahmad Saadawi, a contemporary Iraqi novelist, has dealt with wars and their outcomes in his works. His novel “Indeed He Dreams or Plays or Dies” makes references to different kinds of violence and reconstructs them to assess the reactive behavior of the society. What results from this behavior is a set of affective acts of violence that are internalized in the minds of people. The author has also staged social fright in a good way. This study is conducted through a descriptive-analytic method to examine the concept of violence in Saadawi’s novel. For this purpose, different types of violence are analyzed by narrative techniques, and the author’s objectives of showing violence in that novel are identified. As the results indicate, concrete and physical violence has led to panic and mental intimidation in the Iraqi society. The novel conveys this issue to its audience by such narrative techniques as the stream of consciousness, polyphony and meta-narration. Moreover, a combination of imagination and realism is used to express the war-induced violence represented by the elimination of social values, opposition to symbols, tendency for immigration and desire for segregation from Iraq.