The Perception of Memory and Identity in The Sacred Night of Tahar Ben Jelloun

Abstract

In France, the semiotic method of analysis that developed as an important branch of structuralism accepts text as a semantic construction. Considering this, the Paris school of Semiotics developed a method that gradually phased out texts as surface and deep structure. In this study, we use semiotic methods to analyze the book The Sacred Night, which is a continuation of the novel titled The Sand Child, for which the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun won the "Prix Goncourt" in 1987. The semiotics of Greimas, also known as the Paris school of Semiotics, comes from the basic principles of metamorphosis and includes a description and analysis of narrative elements. In our study, the narrative level of the action areas covers the protagonist and other characters involved in the novel La nuit sacree, the discursive level contains the figurative and thematic roles that people engage in, and the semes and the isotopies appear in the deep structure by which means the semantic structure of texte. We examine the fantastic story of Zehra, who is raised as a male child and explores feminine identity after his father's death in the context of memory and identity. After determining the semantic boundaries of memory and identity, we separate the narrative parts and evaluate the narrative processes in the context of time and space.