Abstract
This article explores the narrative strategies employed in Nuruddin Farah's novel, Links, for representing the aftermath of civil conflict in Somalia. Specifically, it examines the novel's many self-conscious references to its own narrative discourse in creating the story of Jeebleh and his return to Mogadiscio. Three specific examples of this dialectic between story and discourse are considered. First, with reference to John Freccero's notion of “infernal irony,” the intertextual references to Dante's Inferno are shown to affect our understanding of Jeebleh's journey and the environment he moves in. Second, the narrator's use of Somali language elements is explored. Several examples are considered, including the narrator's use of proverbs, folktales, and Somali nicknames. Rather than reflecting the novel's imagined cultural environment, these elements are shown to reflect back on the narrator's efforts at creating a story. Finally, the resolution of the story's central conflict is evaluated in terms of the destabilizing effect of the novel's self-referential narrative. It is shown that, ultimately, the signs and symbols of the novel's “hellish” environment do not offer meanings that transcend the limits of the environment itself. In other words, the novel can show us the civil conflict as a sort of hell, but it can offer no pathway out.
