When Language Rewrites History: A Narrative Discourse Analysis of Rory McCarthy's Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq | ||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||
| Article 10, Volume 82, Issue 1, April 2023, Pages 291-336 PDF (3.19 M) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2023.313630 | ||
| Author | ||
| Rehab Farouk Gad | ||
| Associate Professor of Linguistics Mansoura University Faculty of Arts Department of English | ||
| Abstract | ||
| When people communicate, they tend to tell stories, narrate events and place themselves in place and time. It is through narration that social identities are built (Forchtner 2021). Narrative Discourse Analysis has been implemented in critical discourse studies in 1960s. Main events which shape histories of countries and nations have tremendously occupied narrative texts. In 2003, with the USA announcing its invasion to Iraq, real life experiences have been narrated. The present study analyses one of the major novels written on the 2003 Iraq which is Rory McCarthy's (2006) Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq. The analysis is carried out through the lens of Narrative Discourse Analysis following Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Johnstone (2001). The study addresses the following questions: (1) in what way have the events that the novelist witnessed acted as the stimulus of the selected narrative piece; (2) how does the language of the novel manage to portray the war on Iraq and the devastating life conditions of Iraqis; (3) what are the features of narrative discourse that the selected novel exhibits; (4) in what way does the narrative structure of stories told by a first-hand writer differ from that written by a novelist who did not witness the events. The study refers to McCarthy's narrative piece as A Novel of Witness that exhibits the functional narrative features which reflect the devastating conditions of a country in war. The novel is not orderly due to the gloomy context of narration. Two types of complication actions are identified here: Main Complicating Actions (MCAs) and Commentary Complicating Actions (CCAs). The study also suggests that McCarthy's text presents a type of narrative referred to as Descriptive Narrative Commentary (DNC). | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Commentary Complicating Actions (CCAs); Main Complicating Actions (MCAs); Narrative Discourse; Narrative Structure; Personal Experience Narratives; Witness novel | ||
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