Death and Dying in the Fiction of Abdo Khal Mohammed H. Albalawi University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Abstract—The fiction of Abdo Khal has received critical treatments in the Arab world focusing on gender, sexuality, moral collapse, village life, and mores. However, Khal’s engagement with death in his novels has been overlooked. This study turns to the conception of death in Khal’s fiction to add to the scholarly understanding of how Saudi fiction tries to construct the subject of death. This research aims at showing the great potential of Arabic fiction to provide ways of investigating the death element as an unavoidable human reality and filling the void formed in Arabic studies by the lack of critical treatments of the subject of death. Index Terms—Saudi literature, Abdo Khal, death and dying, Arabic literature, Saudi fiction I. INTRODUCTION The experience of death is a mysterious event, leading people to try to understand it in forms such as watching others die or imagining it in fictional narratives. The literary critic Walter Benjamin argues that fiction provides an understanding of death that is hard to obtain in real life. 1 The portrayal of death and dying in literature has received a myriad of critical treatments. The literary critic Sorensen (2002) notes, “Death has been treated fully, even enthusiastically, in literature and philosophy” (p. 116). Strubel (2014) echoes the sentiment: “Since the beginnings of what we call literature, death has proven to be its most successful producer. It is that void which needs to be interpreted, the fundamental mystery of existence, which underlies every literary text”. Hence, death in literature is a major driving force, if not the most powerful theme, because death, though it can be seen as an individual experience, is not devoid of a social and cultural framework. It is an essential human condition that literature, as Vovelle (1983) notes, “attempts to respond to in its own way”. Representations of death in literature come in many forms. For example, it opens some stories in an attempt to weave the plot; it creates a reason for the story, such as in crime novels; or it ends the narrative, with the death of a major character bringing closure. Thus death can be, as Hakola and Kivistö (2014) argue, “very useful in literature”. Characters in fiction experience death as a necessary part of life, and in many works, they perish at the end. Regardless of the part death plays in the story, the theme of death has fascinated scholars who have attempted to understand the human condition. Bronfen and Goodwin (1993) note that death “is genuinely of universal interest and every discipline, scholar, and reader have something relevant to add”. And death is not removed from the culture it arises from. The discussion of death would be rather fruitless without understanding its relation to the culture because death, as Bronfen and Goodwin (1993) argue, is culturally constructed. Writing about death is a “genuine attempt”, as Doig (2014) notes, to “experience death—both the moment and the state—before its arrival” due to the power of literature to use the imagination. Saudi literature, like any literature, embraces death and offers representations that aim to provide new understandings of our mortality. However, critics who have approached Saudi literature have paid little or no attention to this subject. Because research has shown that literature “models life, comments on life, and helps us understand life” (Mar & Oatley, 2008), and that it trains us to extend our understanding toward other people, this study attempts to show how literature offers a vessel through which authors design characters that provide insights into death, dying, and mortality. This reading offers new insights into the understanding of how death is depicted in the Saudi novel, through the example of Abdo Khal’s fiction. The reason for choosing Khal is twofold. First, Khal is a prominent, highly celebrated writer in the Saudi literary scene who has produced several works, mostly translated into English, that operate largely on the themes of death and dying. 2 Second, Khal, unlike other Saudi authors, shows death in an uninhibited manner, creating an unpleasant experience for the reader due to the way he weaves death throughout the plot. Albalawi notes that in Khal’s (2022) fiction, “the atmosphere is crammed with tragedies structured by the dualism of life and death”. Khal’s fiction has yielded to the presence and perceptibility of death and shown all death’s consequences, from its disruption of life and creation of pain to its unavoidability that causes suffering. The appearance of religious practices and cultural norms is also manifest in the fundamental personal experiences within his works, which this study seeks to exhibit. II. DEATH SYMBOL IN DEATH PASSES FROM HERE (1995) 3 1 See Benjamin (1968). 2 Many critics have hailed Khal’s artistic creations of stories that touch people’s daily lives and suffering. To read more, see Alkhazim (2006); Alnaami (2009); Almash’hory (2020); Albalawi (2022). 3 Khal took 11 years to write this novel. ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 7, pp. 1730-1737, July 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1307.16 © 2023 ACADEMY PUBLICATION