Manifestations of Irony in the novel (How to Kill a Rabbit) by Salah- Salah

Abstract

The research aims to clarify the meaning of irony and reveal its various manifestations in the novel (How to Kill a Rabbit) as a novel based on irony and black comedy; as it combines reality and unreality, the reasonable and the unreasonable, to expose reality as it is. The research plan is based on three axes: the first axis studies (the irony of the title), while the second axis studies (the narrator's irony of himself), and the third studies (the narrator's irony of situations). This character is drowned by the pressure of alienation, poverty, need and isolation in a torrent of networks of fraud, deception and trickery under religious and sectarian titles that seek purely personal gains by any means and under any name. The torrent sweeps him away and then throws him to a bank, after a successive journey of material and moral losses. But the destiny of man is to move on and continue to rise in his work again without boredom and fatigue. One of the most discussed and interactive topics in the troubled Iraqi reality for decades, exile has been an obsession for millions of Iraqis who left Iraq, whether by force or by their own will, because of the political and economic conditions that Iraq has experienced in the last four decades. The novel "How to Kill a Rabbit" by the novelist Salah-Salah, addressed this theme but from another perspective, more daring and more exaggerated in depicting reality, or what stands behind this reality and shapes it, until the novelist crossed the boundaries of imagination, the forbidden and the permitted, on all levels where custom, religion and morals represent its general framework, as well as exceeding what is permitted in literary taste, that is, through which the reader can interact with the text and accept it, according to his inevitable culture in which he was raised, which forms the system of values ​​and morals that motivates and influences him. In this dialectical text in which reality is intertwined with imagination, we find that the novelist tried to delude the reader into believing the truth of everything that happened, and that what he is reading is a kind of epigraph, and a part of an excerpt from the autobiography of someone who may be the writer himself. This gave the text an organic dimension, meaning that the writer was present in one way or another in his text, through a central hero, and made the novel responsive to him by imposing his opinions and ideas on it, and this is what is technically called "the illusion of persuasion", and surrounding this hero with a group of shallow, undeveloped characters, who work to support the text and its intention, and it is an approach to what is known in the world of cinema as the shadow actor. This problematic hero lived the ordeal of alienation after years of burning coal crushed him in his homeland, until the novel seemed to represent a great process of contempt and sarcasm, practiced by the writer towards a reality whose dark side he addressed, represented by dictatorship, wars, economic blockade, and chaos. He found no means to express it other than sarcasm and vulgar mockery, through instantaneous evocations in which the writer used techniques of flashback and flashback, to compare and approximate events between his recent past and his present.