The Implicit Social Patterns in Qumasha Al-Olayan's Short Story Collection "The Wall Man"

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the implicit social patterns within Qumashah Al-Olayan's "The Wall Man" exploring how entrenched values, customs, and beliefs, as perceived by the writer, govern general social behavior. The studied collection of short stories delves into societal issues, cultural norms, and the complexities of human relationships within established social systems, that implicitly address the problematic nature of human relations and the struggle of its parties for supremacy at various levels and through various means, such as male dominance and tyranny, women's submission, and rebellion, and the relationship of the self to the other. In their entirety, systems formed in the text by the entrenched inherited culture that the story's heroes adopted in their thinking, from which they were unable to escape except in rare cases. The research relied on the procedures and mechanisms of cultural criticism, which links the artistic and semantic structure of the text on the one hand, and the structure of the implicit social systems in the stories and the social practices surrounding them, with the aid of the descriptive-analytical approach. This research concluded with the following key findings: The social system, a cultural system, reveals society's deep structure and regulates individual behavior through laws like customs and traditions. The research recommends to conduct cultural studies that monitor the transformations and dialectics of systems in Al-Olayan's novels and short story collections.