Self-Transformations in Life Outside the Brackets: A Reading of Said Al-Serihi’s Autobiography

Abstract

This paper aims to study Said Al-Serihi’s autobiography Life Outside the Brackets that is considered a new phase of cultural, intellectual, and social awareness in Saudi Arabia. The motives behind writing this autobiography according to Al-Serihi are first discussed, followed by exploring 1) the importance of self-awareness and self-transformations as an incentive for writing the autobiography and 2) the different stages of self-awareness through studying the manifestations of self-transformations and the intellectual controversy that was related to the notion of identity in the text. In doing so, the researcher tackles the following terms: alienation, splitting, and the tragedy of self and the collective sense. Additionally, the narrative construction of Life Outside the Brackets is explored, which is based on various narrative techniques including linguistic levels (direct, poetic, and mythological), time movement (accelerating the narrative via deletion and overview, and slowing it down via dialogue scenes and the descriptive pauses), and place (familiar and monotonous places). The analytical-descriptive approach is utilized to investigate the narrative techniques, and some of the psychological theories are made use of to study the self-transformations and their ideological and psychological struggle in the autobiography’s setting.