An Analysis of Ghassan Kanafani’s Return to Haifa using Greimas’s Actantial Model

Structuralism is amongst the most current and ancient narrative schools. The school was founded based on linguistics to understand the structure for explicating main story structures. According to Greimas, every story consists several actants and every actant has some action models. The novel Return to Haifa written by Ghassan Kanafani was published in 1969. It emphasizes the necessity of facing Palestinians with Israel for achieving their rights regarding their relationship that exists between Palestinians (both Palestinians of 1948 and those living in Arab countries). Ghassan Kanafani writes about Palestine in a realistic framework and comes close to it from different perspectives. He presents facts artistically, the example of which is description of the relationships between land and Palestinians. The novel narratives events between 1948 and 1967. Coherent and narrative aspects of the novel has helped to reread the perspectives of literary criticism theory. So, the actions of the novel were explored using Greimas’s model. The study showed the ability of the approach in exploring Return to Haifa. It also showed that actants are the most parts of the novel and it also concludes that actants of the novel are the most significant elements of the story that include abstract concepts, events, episodes, and personal and physical features of characters.