Abstract

Due to political, religious, and cultural issues, Iraqi society witnessed turmoil, destruction, and social unrest in the 1960s. Therefore, in his debut literary work, the novel “The Sky Was Blue, Ismail Fahd Ismail tried to reflect these depressing societal realities. Using generative structural theory, the study explained the causes of social alienation that led to the protagonist’s disloyalty and rage and feelings of hatred, aversion, and refusal to comply with society’s cultural, political, social, and religious norms. The study aimed to reveal the significant structure by deconstructing and analyzing the text’s constituent elements and demonstrating their connection to Iraq’s cultural and social realities, and also to show how the novelist embodied the Iraqi societal reality in the novel “The Sky Was Blue” using a descriptive analytical approach. The study concluded that, through narrative techniques, especially description and discourse, the author adopted the method of self-interrogation, questioning others and Istedraji interrogation, and to employ symbolic language and simile at some points, to reveal the Iraqi societal reality in the sixties; The significant structure of the text was the lack of stability, harmony, unity and stability in Iraqi society due to disintegration, decadence and class deterioration at that period.
 
Key words: The Sky was blue, Ismail Fahd Ismail, Social Alienation, Generative Structuralism.
 
Extended summary

Introduction

Social alienation is one of the sociological phenomena that causes a person to feel repulsed and alienated from his own society. This phenomenon was emerged in the Iraqi society in the sixties due to the social-political tensions among the people of this country; and Ismail Fahad Ismail depicted it in his debut literary work "The sky was blue".
This study employed Goldmann's generative structuralism method to examine this novel from a sociological perspective. According to the aforementioned analytical method, the structure of the literary work is the result of the social conditions of the society in which the work was emerged. Similarly, Lucien Goldmann believed that of all the literary forms, the novel is the one better suited for sociological investigation because, in his opinion, novel has little imagery compared to the poem, and most of its constituent elements can be seen in the real world.
This theory consists of two stages, reception and interpretation. In the reception stage, the internal structure of the text is thoroughly examined to reach a meaningful structure, and this meaningful structure is then incorporated into the structure of the society in the interpretation stage,

Materials and Methods

Two types of materials are needed for the sociological analysis of the novel "The sky was blue" in the light of the theory of generative structuralism. The first category is the data that the author receives from the novel itself, which includes story elements such as characters, events, and descriptions, as well as the methods of expression that the author uses to convey his meaning in internal and external dialogues, which are often interrogative and coded sentences. The second category consists of political-social information about the Iraqi society in the sixties, which was obtained through the study of historical books and articles, and the internal structure of the novel should be adapted to the social context of Iraq in that period and found similarities.
This review, used a descriptive-analytical method. In the first part of this method, the definition of the theory of generative structuralism and its fundamental concepts and how to apply them in the literary work were explained, and the second part, discussed how these concepts are applied to the texts in the novel.

Research findings

The conducted research showed that certain social, political and religious factors in the Iraqi society had caused a break among its social classes, and it was the educated and cultured class that suffered from disturbances/ chaos and sought to bring the society out of chaos by informing other social classes. The problematic protagonist is a representative of the educated class, and the author prefers to keep him anonymous to show that due to the spread of ignorance among the masses and turning to superstition, and surrendering to oppressive laws, no one would listen to the words of the cultured and educated class. Therefore, the problematic protagonist of the story decides to escape from his country to Iran to escape this situation. Throughout story, the problematic protagonist, by using questions, tries to call other fictional characters to think about the disordered situation of the society, so that they become a little more aware. He believes that the political system ruling the country suppresses any force that opposes its goals for the sake of financial interests and to maintain the presidency and obtain higher government positions, and this caused the spread of corruption, cruelty and ignorance among the people.
The oppressive government deprived the people of freedom of speech and turned them into slaves and one of the methods of creating sedition among the social classes, especially the unlearned or illiterate social classes, was the use of religious discrimination that was happened between different religions. In fact, our wise protagonist in one of his descriptions describing the external reconstruction of the old cinema building, whose name was also changed, cryptically points out to the political revolutions that took place during that period had nothing new to improve the situation of people. and the slogans they chanted were all nonsense and the purpose behind these lies was to deceive the simple and gullible people into joining them in order to achieve their personal and not national goals.

Discussion of Results and Conclusion

The obtained results demonstrate the extent to which the author used storytelling techniques to reveal the deplorable social reality of Iraq in such a way that he attempted to demonstrate the social alienation that the protagonist suffered, through internal dialogues and external dialogues, based on questions and descriptions, and he shows the level of ignorance and simplicity of the Iraqi people, and through the random switching of the pronoun from third person to first person, proves the real existence of the hero to him in the society.
The temporal and spatial structure of the novel, which indicates the absolute darkness and confinement of space, is similar to the suffocating and oppressive atmosphere of Iraqi society, and this similarity originates from a worldview that the author is inclined towards. This worldview, which has created a harmony between the structure of the world of the novel and the social structure of Iraq, is based on the creation of equality between social classes.
By this review, it can be concluded that the generative structuralism method in the literary analysis of a work is important in two aspects; Firstly, it preserves the literary value of a work, and secondly, in terms of its sociological characteristics, it is possible to reveal issues in literature that may have been concealed from critics or historians.