An Analysis of Najib Mahfouz's Al-Soman Val-Kharif with a Morphological Approach

With the emergence of formalists in the early twentieth century, attempts were intensified on the part of narratologists to arrive at a stable pattern in order to study stories and narratives. It was at this time that a Russian formalist anthropologist Vladimir Propp, inspired by the same narratologists, developed an approach to study stories. Propp found out that fairy tales were superficially of various kinds where their heroes and actions had some unity and all these actions could be conflated into thirty one kinds. And that breakthrough was the beginning of the modern narratology. Najib Mahfouz is one of the most renowned contemporary Arab novelists whose narratives and novels are full of Occidental symbolic elements with modern Western structural genres hence; they qualify for the morphological study. The current paper is an attempt to analyze and study Najib Mahfouz's al-Soman val-Kharif on the basis Propp’s morphological theory and to show that to what extent it follows Propp’s finding. The research findings show that while the thirty one functions are identifiable in Mahfouz's story, its end, however, is different from that of fairy tales i.e. while the hero apparently pulls away from the battle field, he continues with an inner battle with the evil.