Political Jail in the Novels of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, al-Ghitani's Zayni Barakat, Munif’s East of the Mediterranean, and Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The theme of political jail reverberates in world literature blurring the boundaries of time and place and opening up new avenues for drawing parallels among various literatures. Hence, the main objective of this study is to delve into four celebrated twentieth-century English and Arabic novels, namely, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), al-Ghitani's Zayni Barakat (1971), Munif’s East of the Mediterranean (1975) and Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) investigating the analogies in the pre-, in, and post- jail experience of political detainees stressing that any obstructions in the face of freedom will trigger similar feelings, thoughts and attitudes. The significance of this study emanates from the fact that scholarship on comparative jail fictionــــparticularly political jail novelsــــis insufficient and has not, to the best of my knowledge, set comparison among these novels. To achieve its purpose, the study relies on the concept of analogy as elucidated by two comparatists of the American school: René Wellek and François Jost as the basis for drawing parallels among the aforementioned novels. And for a thorough analysis, it draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of the birth of the prison as its theoretical framework.