The Poetics of Absence and the Semiotics of the Other in the Novel " Which of Us Killed the Other?": A Textual and Cultural Approach

Abstract

             This study examines the dialectical relationship between absence as a textual force that produces meaning, and the concept of the Other as an identity-based dilemma that takes shape at the heart of conflict and transcends it. This is explored through the novel " Which of Us Killed the Other?" by Jordanian novelist Jihad Al-Rajabi, which transforms the 2014 Gaza war into a historical space for existential questions deeper than the event itself and more enduring than its immediate moment. The novel also uses the besieged tunnel as a narrative space that encapsulates the fundamental equation between life and death, identity and loss. The research derives its legitimacy from the fact that this text operates on two parallel levels that rarely intersect in novels: the documentary level, which archives a tragic human moment, and the philosophical level, which deconstructs established dichotomies such as victim and perpetrator, presence and absence, and self and other. This makes it a rich text for the cultural semiotic approach that this study adopts as its methodology and tool.

   This research seeks to analyze the poetics of absence as the essential driving force of the narrative structure in the novel. Absence here is not understood as the opposite of presence in the literal sense, but rather as a textual force that generates meaning, shapes the dramatic trajectory, and creates the characters at their deepest core. Ammar, trapped in the tunnel, is absent from the world of the living without being dead; Jamila, exiled in Europe, is present in body but absent in spirit; and the homeland is an entity intersected by two memories that cannot converge on a single definition.

   The study begins with the concept of "the other," which is doubly implied in the novel's title itself. The "other" in the question "Who killed the other?" does not refer solely to the enemy, but extends to include husband and wife, homeland, exile, memory, and forgetting, in a semiotic network that reveals a complex identity crisis that cannot be resolved by a military conflict. This study, therefore, employs the tools of cultural semiotics, as established by Yuri Lotman, to read the text as a system of signs inseparable from the cultural context that produced it. It aims to uncover the semantic layers that make the novel a cultural document in the anthropological sense before it is a literary text in the aesthetic sense.

    The study is structured around key themes that trace the poetics of absence within the narrative space. Here, the tunnel is interpreted as a boundary marker that negates the classical dichotomy between inside and outside, creating a third space situated on the thin line between death and rebirth. The study then moves to the temporal structure of the novel, where memory fragments to become the true narrator, not the characters. Finally, it addresses the dialectic of self and other in light of the characters the novel has produced, characters who stand on the precipice of fractured identities—from the resister to the exile to the hesitant—in a landscape that questions all certainty and undermines all stability.  The study seeks to prove that the novel “Which of Us Killed the Other?” represents a unique model of the Arabic novel that takes the Palestinian issue as a subject that goes beyond testimony to contemplation, and goes beyond documentation to deep philosophical questioning about the nature of identity, the other, death, and homeland, and that reading it is a semiotic cultural reading that reveals semantic layers that have remained buried under the direct emotional impact that captivates the ordinary reader without leading him to something deeper and more lasting.