Metafictional Narrative Experimentation in Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the metafictional narrative experimentations in Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021). It underscores the experimentations of narrative discourse and its relation in exposing the dilemmas, pains and sorrows of refugees who are displaced and settle in a Greek refugee camp in Lesbos. The refugee camp has become a spatial location for memorizing traumatic scenes and remembering war-related psychological wounds. Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese-American diasporic novelist, and an Anglophone Arab writer. In The Wrong End of the Telescope, Alameddine unveils the dilemmas, disorientations, traumatic disorders, severe anxieties, and the depression of displaced refugees. Moreover, Alameddine defies the conventional technique of narration and entails diversions, contours, detours, and digressions. He experiments with the literary parameters and techniques to create a centrifuge of humanistic and socio-political spaces. Moreover, there are fragmented narratives and overlapping, blurring spatial and temporal boundaries. Thus, Alameddine plays with the imagination of the readers and sweeps over places through various spaces of displaced characters’ tragic stories. The Wrong End of the Telescope vividly represents traumas and memories associated with refugees witnessing life-threatening events accompanied by fear, helplessness, and horror. They experience repetitive violent memories, monstrous flashbacks, and nightmares of living through wars, the loss of loved ones, and the displacement from their homeland.