Duration’s techniques and their functions in encryption and decryption in Abwab al-madinah by Elias Khoury

Lebanese author Elias Khoury is one of the most famous Arab novelist in the field of fantastic literature. The artistic approach to tense has an active role in creating an intense and complex narrative world, and among the temporal concepts, the techniques of duration have an essential function in creating this world, especially in the novel Abwab al-Madinah (“The Gates of the City”), the short, intense, coded novel. Duration is one of the basic temporal concepts in structural criticism, especially in Gerard Gennet's narrative theory. This study attempts to shed light on the structure of the tense structure of Gates of The City through the use of the concept of duration with its four techniques (the summary the ellipsis, the Pause, and the scene) as theorized by Gennet. These techniques have an essential function in making the novel vague and encrypted. That this novel reduces thousand years of story tense in 112 pages is the best evidence of the skillful artistic employment of tense, especially for the tense duration, and it is the result of a comparison between the chronological tense of the story and the imagined tense of the narrative. Duration, with its four techniques, thereby contributing to the encoding of the novel or decoding this encryption.By summary and ellipsis, the tempo and mystiques of the narrative discourse, is increased, and with the Pause and scene, the speed and mystery of the story is reduced. Also in the implicit ellipses and hypothetical ellipses, sometimes we can see a decrease in tempo and the coding and decoding of the novel mystiques. All in all, since the novel has made good use of its duration techniques, it has been able to greatly increase the tempo of the novel and include the "thousand years" of story or history in a short and mysterious text.