”LJUDI NA SUNCU” GHASSAN KANAFANI
"MEN IN THE SUN" BY GHASSAN KANAFANI

Summary/Abstract: The novel "Men in the Sun” by the Palestinian writer Gassân Kanafini dramatizes the attempt of a group of Palestinian refugees to enter Kuwait illegally, hidden in an empty water tank and their death at the border Crossing. The novel has been subject to many, mostly allegoric interpretations based on linking the text with its historical context. It was understood as a sharp criticism of the Arab world’s attitude toward the Palestinians in a decade follow in g their plight from their homeland. As for the stylistic features of the novel, there are some differences in the critics’ opinions. Some consider it a traditional realistic novel, while others place it in the stream of modernism inspired by the great Anglo-American modernistic works. By the time of its writing the novel stands on the border between the two important phases of the A rabic novel. I. e. at the point where the traditional realism which dominated in tire fifties is being pushed aside by experimental literary devices. Its main characteristics - mimesis, referentiality, psychological and social motivation etc., are inherent to realistic fiction, but it bears many devices which break with the narrative tradition of the fifties. These are: the direct interior mono lo gue in which the inner experience of the fictional character is presented without the authorial mediation, free indirect speech - third-person narration which transmits the thoughts/speech of the character, subjective experience, the past and the present blend in the principle of associations and without authorial interventions and the limitation of the narrator’s omniscience in the point of culmination.

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