PROTOTYPE AND READING: UNDERSTANDING ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’S NOVELS
Keywords:
Character prototype, genre prototype, theme prototype, literary tendency, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise, postcolonial literature, migration, trauma, homelessness, the Other, colonialism, Swahili coast, exileAbstract
This article explores the concept of the prototype as a tool for reading the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize winner born in Zanzibar and now living in Britain. Gurnah‘s fiction focuses deeply on colonialism, forced migration, trauma, and the painful experience of being without a home. By examining three kinds of prototypes - character prototypes, genre prototypes, and theme prototypes - the article shows how Gurnah builds a distinctive literary world. Special attention is given to his novel Paradise, which brings all these elements together in a powerful way. The article argues that understanding Gurnah’s prototypes helps readers appreciate not just the surface of his stories but also his unique literary tendency, which is different from many other postcolonial writers. Gurnah does not celebrate hybridity or diaspora in a cheerful way. Instead, he quietly insists on showing how loss, silence, and displacement shape human lives from the inside out.
