Death and Dying in the Fiction of Abdo Khal

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.