The construction of time in Salem Al-Hindawi's novel "The Mill"

Abstract

Time represents one of the main elements on which the novel is based, the most closely attached to it. If time were to disappear, the story would disappear. Its role goes beyond formation to expressing the writer’s vision towards his issues. The study attempts to reveal it through a novel belonging to the realist movement, which is The Mill, by the writer Salem Al-Hindawi, one of the contemporary writers in Libya. The researcher relied in examining its temporal structure on a set of structural proposals that go beyond the limits of discourse, combining the tripartite division: system, duration, and frequency that Todorov brought, and the duality of story and discourse according to Genette, so that the research is formed in three applied systems of narrative time. The first is the time of the story, and the indicators of historical events place it within a historical timeframe extending from the late fifties to the early sixties. The second is the time of the adventure, and its scope is determined by the indicators of natural time in approximately two days. The third is the time of the discourse, and its meaning is the selection of certain time periods outside the framework of the linear sequence. Its features were formed in the novel through three dimensions: the arrangement, which means the position of the event in the flow of time, and it took two forms, which are flashback and foreshadowing. The second is continuity, and its study came through two basic aspects: acceleration, which includes the two paradoxes of summarization and deletion, and slowing down or disruption, and it has two paradoxes, which are dialogue and description. The third dimension is repetition in its three forms: single and repeated narration, and authorship.