Man is a Cause Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassān Kanafānī

The brief life of Ghassan Kanafani (1936-72) revolved around the politics of Palestine. As a leading intellectual of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and an outstanding writer of fiction, Kanafani has left a remarkable record in his novels and short stories of the evolution of his political consciousness and his desperate attempts to come to terms with the loss of his homeland. This study divides Kanafani's works chronologically into three stages of development. The first phase, 1956 to 1965, during which Kanafani's writings aer uniformly bleak and pessimistic in outlook, reveals the frustration and impotence Kanafani felt as the question of Palestine remained in an uneasy limbo. The second and third stage, 1965 to 1968 and 1968 to 1972, which saw the establishment of the P.L.O., armed resistance, and the emergence of Palestinian guerilla organizations, move Kanafani's work into an exuberant, self-confident optimism. Concise plot summaries and translated extracts, to which the author adds literary and psychological analyses, illustrate the chronological division of Kanafani's literary career and highlight the intellectual and political coming of age of this major Palestinian writer. Through this study of his fiction, the ideological, political, and psychological dimensions of Palestinian nationalism are brought into sharper focus.