The Fantastic in the Novel Wonders of Baghdad by Novelist Ward Badr Al-Salem: An Analytical Study

Abstract

Strangeness represents an intentional narrative technique that seeks to break with the familiar and introduce supernatural elements. The writer employs it to attract the reader and make the narrative text more engaging and interactive, incorporating its strange scenes into the narrative structure. Therefore, it is not merely a form of “decoration”; rather, it is a creative structural tool that disrupts established laws and transcends direct realism, thereby granting the text depth and an interpretive dimension that significantly contributes to its construction. This is what we observed in the novel The Wonders of Baghdad by the writer Ward Badr Al-Salim, where this technique constituted a prominent feature of his novel, from the title to the narrative body. Its events depicted spaces presented through the impressions of the narrative characters, and these impressions are nothing but the repercussions of the characters’ interaction with their space, their identification with it, and their fusion with it. Thus, these spaces contributed significantly to enabling a psychological reading of his characters and to imparting a quality of strangeness to the text as a whole. The study recommended a number of recommendations, most notably: attaching great importance to this type of study, particularly as it is experiencing renewed textual manifestations; benefiting from modern critical approaches in dealing with the strange texts employed by the creative writer; and giving the concept a semantic, expressive, and aesthetic identity, while avoiding dissolving its identity or merging it with other concepts that have no conceptual or contextual affinity with it.