Fiction and Documentary in Sonallah Ibrahim’s Novel (Americanly)

Abstract

The study aims to analyze Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel “Americanly” based on its category as being documentary. The novel includes many documented texts of historical and current events. These texts are embedded in the margins and in the body of the novel.  He embedded these events while speaking about the biography of the main character of the novel, seeking to explore the individual self through a documenting framework to capture the truth. Thus, Ibrahim deviated from the traditional fictional writing to be an adventurous, and found new avenues which combined scientific research, movies, historical documents and journal news. This obligates the novelist to carry the burden of maintaining the authenticity of information and its documentation process without losing the aesthetics and creativity of the work itself. The novelist is also required to focus on the dimensions of narration and fiction in the novel.

The researcher explored the narrative structure of the novel in an attempt to study the balance resulted in such types of novels, where fiction is entwined with documentation, reality entwined with no reality, and subject entwined with the self, in an interesting approach fluctuating between mind and beauty