Prisoner of Mirrors

Author's name: Saud Al-Sanousi

In this work, the narrator approaches the human self and its hidden tendencies, skillfully combining the theses of modern narrative criticism with the techniques of psychology and psychoanalysis to formulate a critical complex that seeks to explore multiple issues: the homeland, the occupied other, punishment and reward, values ​​and ideals, sadness and loneliness, memories and associations. Collectively, they are discourses or letters in which the novelist defines his conception of himself in relation to writing. He then turns to the question of the act of writing, where the insistence on experimentation seems a strong demand, given what this means in terms of immersion in the question of the self. The story of its hero "is similar to a boring movie, in which the absolute heroism was reserved for sadness, which endured until the end. As for happiness, it was the poor child who appeared in her white dress for a few minutes (...). As for my story, it was a mixture of sadness, pain, orphanhood, and deprivation, sprinkled with seeds of happiness that were too insignificant to have any taste..." What distinguishes the work is that realistic vision tinged with the possibilities of romantic conscience and dimensions of tragic sense and what it reflects in terms of manifestations of loss and deprivation of the reality of the (individual) ego of the hero, as much as it refers to the other side of the paradox represented in the dominance of horror imposed by the scenes of the invasion of Kuwait in the nineties on the reality of the hero and his loss of his father "Dawoud Abdel Aziz" who was martyred defending his country... From here the plot of the novel intensifies for our writer through the threads of the emotional scene marked by the characteristics of resistance, rejection and arrogance that direct the behavior of the other - the aggressor - in contrast to the swelling sense of the ego of frustration and decline to the point of despair and atrophy in the novel's hero. Especially when he loses his mother later. “Prisoner of Mirrors” is more than letters or tales told here and there. It is a dig in memory and a reading that encompasses that Kuwaiti diversity with all its intensity and amazing backstages. In it, Alsanousi formulates a problematic in which the (social-psychological) intertwines with the (cultural-cognitive) of his country’s history to highlight between the lines the struggle of hope and despair, the surge of romantic love in its most sublime and delicate forms, and looking at the world through the “eyes of the heart” alone.