Narrative Time in Sahar Khalifeh's "Hobbi Al Awal: Gerard Genette's Structuralism Theory

Time is a major structural element upon which stories are formed. In classics, time structure relied on a logical and causal relationship, but with changes in reality time movement went through transformations. Using this element for their narrative objectives, writers decided to experience other forms of time. This led to abandoning time linearity and a split between narrative and story times. Contemporary novels do it by the techniques of order and time rhythm. Khalifeh, returning to the past in "Hobbi Al Awal", retells Palestine's history through a romantic story. Adopting a descriptive-analytical method, this research examines time structure in the novel without attention to the concept of repetition using Genette's narrative time and through temporal distances between the story and narrative. As the present interferes with the past, the novel has a scattered structure of time, with the reader moving between the present and the past. This happens by various techniques for strengthening the story's objectives, which either accelerate or decelerate the narrative and include summary, deletion, stream of consciousness, internal dialogue and rendition, making time longer in some scenes and shorter in some others.