Outburst of a Questioning Style in the Novel ‘The Second War of the Dog’ by Ibrahim Nasrallah (An Aesthetic Review)

In his narrative text entitled “The Second War of the Dog”, the Palestinian novelist, Ibrahim Nasrallah, has reviewed the Palestinian people’s hardships in an imaginative way and used language forces to reveal those hardships. The text of this novel deserves syntactic and rhetorical analyses due to the aesthetic revelation of its questioning style, which, together with its varied types, accounts for the most important questioning styles utilized for arousing the audience's emotions, improving aesthetics of the text, further impressing the audience, and strengthening the meanings in their minds. Therefore, men of letters have constantly wanted to employ this style in their literary works because of its wider range of inferred virtual meanings compared to other styles. Using a descriptive-analytical method based on statistical stylistics, this study sought to reveal the hidden rhetorical meanings of its questioning style and assess the extent of fit between its question tools and three levels of language, i.e., storytelling, description, and dialogue, as well as expressing the most important aesthetic aspects of this style for conveying meaning to the audience. One of the major results of this research was that the narrator had often employed a questioning style at the level of dialogue since the characters of the novel often used to dispute for being surprised by the existence of similaritis and doubts and not being able to distinguish between them and reach the truth. This style was found to be mostly used for conveying the two meanings of negation and denial since they so well fit with the pessimism atmosphere prevailing in the novel as they could reveal the political, economic, and cultural opportunism of the novel's characters depicting a new generation that worked only for its own interests, regardless of the public interest of Palestine.