Narrative Techniques between Tradition and Modernity in Raja Alem’s Novels

Authors
Fiyan Abdolrahman Ahmed Alshozi
Sharafat Karimi
jamil jafai
University of Kurdistan
Abstract
This study explores the narrative techniques employed by Saudi novelist Raja Alem to reveal how modernist devices such as temporal play, interior monologue, and polyphony are used to deconstruct and reconstruct inherited cultural and authoritative traditions within the structure of narrative consciousness. The research moves beyond traditional descriptive approaches to examine the aesthetic and ideological functions of these techniques in linking the characters’ individual consciousness to their inherited cultural and social memory. using an analytical narratological methodology based on concepts of modern narratology, the study applies close textual analysis to selected works by Alem. It examines temporal play and flashback as tools for breaking linear chronology and exposing the psychological depth of characters; interior monologue and stream of consciousness as methods for presenting the self and its inner conflicts; and polyphony as a narrative strategy that resists single-authorial dominance and opens space for dialogic multiplicity.

The findings reveal that Raja Alem’s narrative art integrates tradition and modernity through a sophisticated interplay of techniques. Flashbacks reconstruct collective and cultural memory, interior monologues uncover the tension between the alienated self and its social constraints, and polyphonic structures dismantle narrative authority to enable dialogue between heritage and modernity. The study concludes that Alem’s fiction represents a distinctive model of contemporary Arabic narrative, capable of reshaping the psychological and social identity of its characters through a multilayered synthesis of modernist experimentation and traditional consciousness.
Keywords
Heritage
Modernity
narrative techniques
Raja Alem
Arabic Narratology
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