Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) is a tale of two heroic female characters whose spirits are still shining despite the miserable life and the dimmest rays of hope they have. This novel portrays and renders a sense of what daily life, especially life of women, is like in Kabul --both before and during the restrictive and destructive reign of the Taliban. As a humanitarian and activist, Hosseini wants to depict the tragedies that the Afghan women had endured, the discrimination and violence that they had suffered in the contemporary Afghan society. This motivated him to write this novel to focus on women's suffering and endurance simultaneously due to the multiple dominations of the patriarchal society. Each part in the novel deals with new pattern of hardships and torture, which have their roots either in childhood, like Mariam's miserable childhood, or in war and death of the loved ones, as Laila's suffering when losing her family in the war. As the theme of suffering and endurance is common and recurrent in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the current study examines the ability of the major characters to accept and cope with their sufferings and struggles, whether they are physical or emotional, and even regulate it. It tries to find an answer to the question of how the characters have the capacity to grapple with their anguish. As the study adopts the concept of suffering as the frame of analyzing characters’ ability to grapple with the suffering and hardships of women in the eastern society, it is, thus, going to identify the meaning of suffering, shedding light on its types as a concept and its forms as an object. Then it uses this concept as a means to investigate and study the suffering of Mariam and Laila in A Thousand Splendid Sun.
Diana Evans is a writer from mixed origins. Her multiracial family has provided her with the basic framework to write 26a. This research tackles issues of non-belonging and sense of restoration in the novel, which the characters feel after being dislocated and pushed to live in different locations or with different people. The notions of belongingness and diaspora have received considerable attention from literary and social scholars as different diasporic writers start to bring out their experiences and articulate their worldviews. The issues of cultural diversity, belonging and diaspora are found in Evans’ novel 26a. In this novel, the sense of home and feeling of belonging overwhelm the narrative as protagonists start to mix with more than one culture. According to their various origins. This study sheds light on the cultural diversity of the novel 26a and its impact on the identity and sense of belonging of the characters.
The study examines a tendency in Robert Coover’s the Babysitter, which is the conception of time as a form of temporal distortion. Temporal distortion is a phenomenon of time mainly appearing as a visual phenomenon characterized by a disruption of time sense and consciousness. Postmodern fiction commonly employs temporal distortion as a technique, with the intention of satire or sarcasm. The author usually focuses on the idea of time in which he/she leaps from past to present or the opposite or there might be mentions of history and culture that do not fit the era of the literary work. Temporal distortion is also employed to question reality by calling into question the social and cultural conceptions of time. The present paper aims at studying the approach of time in Coover's The Babysitter, which draws particular attention to the idea of shifting in time. Both reasonable and opposed events happen at the same time, and none of them is preferred over the other in giving actions. All forms of time are intertwined; therefore, its influence on the author's extraordinary writing style is reflected in his story.
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