In The Story of Zahra, Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh presents betrayal as the very essence of narrative and narrativity. It becomes a postmodernist syndrome with various symptoms and multiple manifestations, predicated, as it is, on all manner of deception in the negotiation of female identification and self-defining modes. It starts from the enunciation of the title itself: the third person referent implies a certain detachment; a voice promising to unveil Zahra’s secrets and hence breach her interiority. This detached voice is the one behind the scenes, Zahra’s double and the marker of her schizoid self.
We broke up over six kids—that’s how I always told the story. But of course that was no story. I don’t mean that it wasn’t fiction (although it wasn’t ), just that it wasn’t narrative. It was only the prelude to a punch line. Six kids? the person to whom I had said this would ask. What kids?
Kids we didn’t have.
Then the laugh. And we’d move on.
She had been standing on the platform of a small decayed station.
'I'll never forget this moment as long as I live,' Tsueko thought, staring at the blue silhouette of the Southern Alps.
The morning sun began to rise over the mountaintop. The cold air swept against her legs in her monpe pants.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a children story book, popularized through two movie productions carrying the same name is a story which uses the capitalist society as its setting. It revolves around a capitalist in the laissez-faire system and a family of workers. Although the story exposes the extreme social and economic stratification of the society, it fails to recognize it as a result of the capitalist system. Mr. Wonka, the Capitalist is glorified. The pauperization of the worker’s family is seen as an inevitable outcome of development. Chocolate as a commodity is fetishized.