Narrative Mechanism in the Essays of Wahy al-Qalam: A Study on the Limits of Intertextual Overlap Between the Essay and the Short Story

Abstract

This study falls within contemporary critical approaches that seek to reconsider the concept of literary genre by tracing manifestations of intergeneric overlap within literary discourse. It takes Wahy al-Qalam by Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi‘i as its applied field, considering it a prominent example of prose writing that transcends the traditional boundaries separating the essay from the short story.
The study starts from the hypothesis that literary genre has become a flexible system based on interaction and hybridity, a phenomenon clearly reflected in al-Rafi‘i’s texts, which blend the reflective nature of the essay with the narrative structure of the short story. The essays under study present their ideas through various narrative techniques such as event construction, character formation, dialogue usage, and the exploitation of time and space, granting them a distinct narrative vitality. These texts are built upon a dual structure that combines thought and narration, where the idea becomes a semantic nucleus around which narrative elements are constructed, achieving a form of integration between the contemplative and the storytelling dimensions.