Frame Narrative Technique: Paralleled Heterotopias in Mohamed Rageh's A Quarter Citizen

Abstract

The research has a threefold literary approach with a psychological, philosophical as well as a technical perspective. It aims at examining the narrative technique used by Egyptian novelist and script writer Mohamed Rageh in A Quarter Citizen. The research seeks to show Rageh’s novel as belonging to the narrative therapy type. It suggests that following this type of therapeutic narrative, Rageh builds heavily on the Michael Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ and frame narrative technique. This could be traced in the novel’s presentation of different types of heterotopias together with a form of frame narrative exemplified in his presentation of a scriptwithina novel technique. This sets narration in Rageh’s A Quarter Citizen as starkly built on parallelism and juxtaposition. In his scenanovel, as he ventures to calls it, Rageh juxtaposes the protagonist's true experience with a different version of it rendered in the form of a script. A further type of parallel in the novel is that between different forms of 'heterotopias' especially the prison as heterotopias of deviation where the larger part of the novel's actions take place. In light of this, the research seeks to trace the extent to which narration was an aid to the novel's protagonist and how far it helped him to relieve his psychic disturbances resulted from his incarceration experience. In so doing, the research poses the question whether narration in Rageh's A Quarter Citizen proves to be therapeutic or not and if it successfully follows the two prerequisite steps of narrative therapy namely externalization and suggestion. Further questions are concerned with the therapeutic role played by the script/ heterotopia and the models of identity building suggested by the script.