Manifestations of Narrative Existence in the Short Story Collection: (A Blue Creature, or… Perhaps)

This study seeks to address the manifestations of narrative existence in the short story by selecting the short story collection “A Blue Object, or Perhaps” by the writer Sultan Al-Amimi. It does so by opening up a reading to uncover the phenomena of narrative construction, from the interpretation of blueness, time, history, and existence, to the presence of experimental and fantastical narratives and the role of imagination in their formation. The study also examines the interrelationship between anxiety, existence, and experimentation, among other narrative manifestations. While the texts read in this collection differ in their treatment of human existence, the hypothesis we attempt to address is the extent of their contact with different human experiences. This makes the process of their reception a revealing one for the dimensions of human experience, even at the level of the chromatic dimension that headlines the collection’s title, in addition to the other texts. For this purpose, hermeneutics was chosen as a methodology for reading these texts, as it played a prominent role in activating the trend towards language as the existential home of man. This has deepened the adherence to language in a way that makes human existence an existence in language itself. While some hermeneuticists have attributed a historical-temporal dimension to human existence, others have regarded language as an aesthetic game that reveals a part of human being. Still others posit the narrative dimension as the very essence of human being, which manifests itself within the storytelling process itself.