The role of time narration in the development of Genette narrative discourse process in Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Sa'd novel

In Genette's narrative discourse, both the story and its way of narration, namely discourse are emphasized and narration is regarded as an interaction between the story and discourse. In this approach, discourse has three aspects: form, tone and time that is consisted of discipline, continuity and repetition. Using a descriptive-analytical method and by investigating the structure of time, narrative focuses, the distance between narration and narrator's expression in Umm Sa'd novel, in the present study we try to analyze narrative text and determine the extent of application of this approach by Ghassan Kanafani with the purpose of forming the narrative system and structure of the story. It is supposed that the novel is involved with interference of triple time periods and fits this hypothesis; hence it is demonstrated that due to focusing on descriptive pause at the beginning of the story, the story's acceleration is negative and non-important events are removed at the end parts of the story, as a result the narration gains a positive acceleration; however, the dominant frequency is singular in this story and repetitive frequency has been used for meaningful emphasis in novel's plot. By violating the time's linear routine, the author has used different types of retrospective and prospective anachronism but simultaneous narration that manifests as dialogue and debate between two parties has the most frequency and this caused a realistic space within the story and reduction of the distance between audience and text, as a result Kanafani's narrative dynamism is enhanced.