Ideological Domination in Gamal al Ghitani’s Al Rifa‘i based on Boris Uspensky’s Theory

This study aims to analyze ideological dominance in Jamal al-Ghitani’s novel Al-Rifa‘i by examining the system of values that frames the novelistic discourse and determines the narrator’s judgments of characters and events. It investigates how the dominant point of view is constructed and how it shapes the perception of the fictional world and limits the independence of other perspectives. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical approach, drawing on the ideological level of the Russian critic Boris Uspensky’s theory, which makes it possible to examine point of view through the evaluative criteria governing the representation of reality within the text. The analysis traces the relationship between the narrator’s ideological stance and the perspective embodied by the protagonist, while identifying areas of agreement and divergence between them. It also examines how evaluative positions are distributed among the characters and the resulting differences in their presence within the narrative discourse.The study concludes that ideological dominance in Al-Rifa‘i is not tied to the protagonist’s physical presence; rather, it stems from his system of values, which dominates the text as a whole. The novel presents a model of a monophonic narrative voice in which the third-person external narrator fully adopts the protagonist’s ideological perspective, leaving no space for a competing or opposing ideology. This dominance is manifested through several narrative mechanisms, including sustained focalization on al-Rifa‘i’s inner world, the coloring of the narrative language with his emotional and cognitive tone, and the marginalization of secondary characters by keeping them within external focalization