The Narrative Panorama of Men in the Sun:  Negotiating Polyphony and Multiple Voices

AlDhaheri, ِAysha

doi:10.21608/qarts.2025.372747.2194

The Narrative Panorama of Men in the Sun: Negotiating Polyphony and Multiple Voices

Document Type : Original Article

Author

ِAysha AlDhaheri

PhD Program in English United Arab Emirates University

10.21608/qarts.2025.372747.2194

Abstract

This paper explores Ghassan Kanafani’s famous novel Men in the Sun to argue that the author incorporated a unique narrative structure to engage major thematic issues about war, refugees, resistance, and other topics integral to the text. On this basis, the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and others on narratology and polyphony will be used to discuss the different attitudes of the multiple fictional voices in the novel toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The paper points out that the vision of Kanafani regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented by a variety of narrators constituting the four major characters in the novel in addition to a fifth narrator representing the authorial voice and mapping out the dominant perspective toward the central themes of the novel. The paper also demonstrated that Kanafani’s novel was a turning point in the Palestinian literary Renaissance. The novel was published in the early 1960s as a commentary on the consequences of the Palestinian tragedy resulting from the Israeli occupation of most of the Palestinian territories in 1948. The novel, which raised a variety of themes about occupation, resistance, and displacement, was followed by a huge body of writing in fiction, drama, and poetry in the same vein constituting the Palestinian literary renaissance, which started in the 1960s and came to an end in the 1990s after the reconciliation accords between the Palestinian Authority and Israel in Oslo.

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