شکست زمان در رمان «مذکّرات کلب عراقی»، اثر عبدالهادی سعدون بر اساس نقد روایت‌شناسی و بر پایة نظریه ی ژرار ژنت

Introduction: Narrative is as old as human history, and its scope has expanded to such an extent that today it has become one of the common concepts in the field of literature, especially fiction. Narratology is a new science which studies the structural elements of stories. This science examines different structures of a narrative, such as the narrator, plot, character, etc. It flourished in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Gérard Genette was a French structural critic and one of the most famous theorists in this field. According to him, narrative speech consists of three distinct levels that must be distinguished in any critical approach to fiction. One is the story being told, the report itself and how the report is presented. He believes, in analyzing the narrative, the three elements of time, mood and voice should be taken into consideration. He believes that time is important in the narrative in terms of order, duration and frequency.
Methodology: This research is based on the narrative criticism and uses a descriptive-analytical approach to examine the quality of the application of the time component and its dependencies such as order, duration and frequency in the novel “Mozakkerato Kalben Iraqien” written by Abdul Hadi Saadoun, who is an Iraqi novelist. The analysis is done according to Genette’s theory. The purpose of this study is to identify the author's narration techniques in using the element of time and to measure the difference between the time of the story and the time of the narration in the novel. Therefore, this article tries to answer these questions ‘What is the function of each of the three factors of Genette’s narrative time in this novel?’ and ‘What is the role of each of them in advancing the story? For this purpose, the theory of Genette narrative time has been introduced for the analysis ofvthe novel.
Results and Discussion: The results of this study indicate that the association of the narrator's memories, the background representation of the life of the sub-characters of the story by him and the expression of the characters' hope for the future events have disturbed the linear and natural order of time in the narration of this novel, In addition, various descriptions, the use of the element of summarization and various types of frequencies have changed the narrative speed of this novel.
In this novel, the chronology of the events is sometimes not observed, and the retrospective events and sometimes the foresight of the characters have caused the plot of the story to become time-consuming. Saadoun uses the external retrospective technique to introduce the characters of the story and mention the events outside of it. In the retrospective technique within the story, the narrator takes the reader to the past within the story by quoting memories. One of the functions of compound retrospective techniques is characterization; it is a different retrospection of the story because it refers to events that are not related to the storyline. In the technique of foresight, the author removes the ambiguity and complexity of the text and increases the reader's desire to read more. In his narrative text, Saadoun uses all the four narrative movements of Genette (i.e. descriptive pause, omission, summary, and dramatic scene); Therefore, the narrative has negative, positive and constant types of acceleration. In this novel, there is evidence for different types of frequencies with different values. The narrator has used the singular frequency in both the main and sub-events of the story. Frequency is somewhat evident in the novel because of the importance of the subject. Saadoun has sought to increase the speed of his narration by summarizing the text.
Conclusion: In relation to the category of order and in terms of chronological order, the narrator reports his memoirs from birth to an old age. But, sometimes, the linear order of the events is not observed, and there are time-distortions in the text. The anachronisms of this text are manifested in both retrospective and futuristic aspects. Of course, the retrospective type has twice the volume compared to the futuristic type. A small number of external retrospectives have also been observed in the narration, which has a complementary ruling and helps to complete the main narration. Futurism, which has little expression in the novel, is often diagrammed in the form of the narrator's dreams, hopes, speculations, and predictions, or other characters in the story, which evoke the reader's passion.
Regarding the category of duration and in terms of time lag, it can be said that the novel covers a long period of the narrator's life. However, the extensive use of the element of summary and sometimes various types of deletions has caused a positive acceleration of the novel and increased the speed of narration. Of course, a wide range of text time is also devoted to various descriptions, which, by stopping the story time, has caused a negative acceleration in the novel. Very few chunks of time are devoted to dialogues, in which case the text time has progressed normally.
 Regarding the category of frequency, all the three types of frequencies are seen at the text level, but the singular and narrative types are much more impressive than the frequent type. The singular frequency, which revolves around both the main and sub-events of the story, includes narrations of events related to the narrator and the teacher as well as the narrator's encounters and separations with the sub-characters of the story. The frequent frequency function, which is very rare in the novel, has been motivated by people expressing their position on an event and by emphasizing the narrator of an incident. The frequent use of narrator frequency throughout the novel has, however, caused the narrative to be shortened and the text to deviate from monotony. This is because the narrator has avoided mentioning the events that happened to him or the characters of his story continuously at some point in time.