دراسة فنّ الوصف في رواية «الثائر الأحمر» لعلي أحمد باكثير

Study of Art of Description in the Novel "Al-Thaer Al-Ahmar" Written by Ali Ahmad Bakatheer

In the modern age, the novel is considered as "new Arab works" that within a short period of time this genre had more attracted authors' attention than the other literary genres. The art of description is the most important narrative tool and by relying on it the writer is able to represent his mental world before readers as real as possible. Ali Ahmad Bakatheer is one of the Arab contemporary authors who has a high status and reputable in such areas of Arabic literature as poem, play and historical novel. The “al-Thaer al-Ahmar” (the red revolutionist) is one of his most popular novels that, in our opinion, can technically be classified as the top novel because of having intellectual significances. As we have seen at most modern critique investigations on the works written in prose, in particular fiction, novel and play, the researchers have referred to the art of "description" only by studying the key elements in a fiction such as time, place and character and they have rarely dealt with a specific investigation. In this paper, the art of "description" is examined specifically in the novel “al-Thaer al-Ahmar”. The method used in this research is descriptive-analytical one. This paper attempts to examine the description and determine the forms, applications, tools and targets in the novel "al-Thaer al-Ahmar" and its aim is to indicate the effect of these important elements on narrative structure and the quality and the degree of the narration using the possibilities of it as high as possible. The results show that the art of description in the novel in question has different functions such as descriptive, interpretive and aesthetical ones. Ali Ahmad Bakatheer best employed this technique to represent the social and political situation of the period in question. By using different genres in his work, Bakatheer employs the characters, place, time and objects… as an effective tool in order to create suitable space where the events are going on by which he takes the readers to the heart of narration and encourages them to follow the story willingly as if they are really living at such narrative space. He also provides the readers with political and social situation where the events of the narration are going on. In this novel, the description of the characters' inner and outer states as well as those of descriptions having implicative and interpretive function is of more frequency (presence) than the other genres of description.