Anxiety and fragmentation in 'In the Dark Corner'

Contemporary fiction, shaped by the accelerating rhythm of modern life, constantly attempts to capture moments of profound human truth — moments of rejection, alienation, transformation and emotional disintegration.
It seeks to probe these unsettling shifts artistically in a world where values, ideas and identities are increasingly entangled with consumerism and the pressures of modern existence.
From the very first threshold of Omani writer Abdullah Khalifa’s short-story collection In the Dark Corner, the image of the “corner” becomes central to the act of observation and analysis. From that corner, the narrator watches, interprets and moves closer to the inner worlds of his characters.
The darkness of the corner serves two functions: it allows the narrator to observe with greater intimacy while also maintaining a necessary distance from the characters themselves. Hidden in that shadowed space, the observing eye moves freely through their fractured psychological landscapes. Even the cover artwork reinforces this atmosphere: two hands emerging from darkness seem to struggle towards life, as though the darkness itself were attempting to consume the characters and disrupt their fragile sense of balance.

The stories delve deeply into the inner worlds of their characters, probing existential questions, buried memories and persistent anxieties. These figures rarely possess fixed names or clearly described appearances. Instead, they acquire a broader human dimension, defined more by psychological depth than physical identity. Their fears, obsessions and emotional fractures become the true engines of the narrative. One passage captures this fragmentation vividly:
“People keep entering. A great wave of voices, faces and hands. Hands pulling me backwards, hands striking me. I see a mirror on the wall — and I see myself”.
Here, the narrative emerges not from external action alone, but from inner disturbance — from memory, fear and unresolved psychological conflict.
The characters carry accumulated anxiety rooted in childhood trauma or painful experiences buried in the past. These memories erupt repeatedly, pushing them towards isolation, fear and psychological collapse. Reality itself becomes unstable, blending past and present into a single oppressive emotional landscape. In the story One Eye, the narrator observes:
“In the lights dancing upon the water, he saw the past colliding with the present until they merged. He tried to organise his thoughts. Had he changed? Had he begun needing other people? Why was he afraid of the moon?”
The collision between past and present produces a constant sense of dread. Fear of others drives many of the characters into solitude and emotional withdrawal. They fail to harmonise with their surroundings and instead retreat deeper into their psychological worlds.
The narrative structure throughout the collection prioritises interiority over external action. Events unfold slowly, often subordinated to psychological transformation rather than dramatic plot. The story Forty demonstrates this particularly clearly through its meditative treatment of time and memory.
In The Taste of Blood, the protagonist is haunted by a traumatic childhood memory. Although childhood conventionally symbolises innocence and joy, here it becomes associated solely with pain and emotional suffocation. The traumatic event itself remains partially obscured, revealed only through symbolic fragments rather than direct description. Yet its psychological consequences dominate the character’s entire existence, eventually leading to a catastrophic ending: “He began striking his head violently against the shattered walls of the kiosk. When he saw his blood running across the broken walls like snakes, he staggered and collapsed lifeless to the ground”.

This story reveals two defining features of Abdullah Khalifa’s narrative method. First, he is deeply preoccupied with the psychological consequences of trauma rather than the traumatic event itself. Second, he focuses artistically on the emotional aftermath — on fear, collapse and alienation — allowing the entire narrative structure to revolve around those inner wounds.
Fear and paranoia permeate most of the collection. In One Eye, the protagonist awakens in terror during the middle of the night:
“He woke in panic at midnight. He knew that thing was here. He tried to confirm its presence, yet trembled at the mere thought that it might be standing outside his window”.
The story’s emotional architecture depends not on conventional flashbacks, but on the gradual revelation of psychological effects. The protagonist’s terror originates from a buried childhood memory connected symbolically to the moon and to the death of his father and brother. As the narrative develops, the emotional significance of the moon becomes increasingly clear:
“If the full moon had been there on that cursed night... that tiny detail had never seemed connected to the hateful night before, but now he remembered”.
The story becomes a dense web of interconnected symbols: childhood, moonlight, death and memory fuse into a single psychological structure.
One particularly significant symbol is the window, which functions simultaneously as a psychological and narrative threshold. It separates interior crisis from the threatening outer world:
“He must be standing there outside the window waiting for him. The moment he opened it, he would see him”. The window thus becomes the gateway through which fear enters the character’s life, linking present anxiety with traumatic memory.
A similar atmosphere dominates. The Sunglasses on the Road. Once again, the protagonist appears without a clearly defined physical identity. Anxiety, confusion and alienation drive his actions. He struggles with failed relationships, memory loss and emotional instability:
“What use was any of this after my wife left me and took our daughter with her?”
Yet marital breakdown alone does not explain the character’s crisis. He exists between forgetting and remembering, city and village, presence and absence. These opposing states intensify his sense of estrangement and psychological fragmentation. Even the black sunglasses acquire symbolic significance, suggesting a desperate search for clarity in a world clouded by confusion and loss.
Throughout the collection, recurring binaries dominate the narrative discourse: memory and forgetting, light and darkness, interior and exterior worlds. Symbols such as mirrors and windows deepen these oppositions, exposing the characters’ inability to reconcile themselves with reality. The mirror points towards fractured identity, while the window separates the crisis-ridden interior self from the threatening external world.
The title story, In the Dark Corner, embodies these concerns most explicitly. The protagonist becomes trapped in a painful struggle between remembering and forgetting a traumatic childhood event. This psychological conflict forms the core of the narrative structure:
“The memory stops here. I know that when I began crying, I saw something that terrified me, but my mind refuses to remember the rest. I am exhausted and I have exhausted my doctor”.
Most characters in the collection undergo similar journeys into childhood memory. The return to those formative traumas destabilises both the narrative structure and the characters’ emotional worlds. Each attempt at confronting the past leads only to deeper collapse and greater inability to adapt to reality: “I nearly fell from fear, then regained my balance and tried to flee, but a rough hand seized me... I know that at that moment I sank into complete darkness and could no longer scream. I have been unable to scream for twenty years”.
The stories frequently overlap in theme and atmosphere. Characters remain trapped between memory and oblivion, unable either to forget their pain or fully confront it. In this suspended space between past trauma and present reality, their inner worlds continue to fracture, carrying the full weight of anxiety, alienation and psychological disintegration.

HAMOUD SAUD The author is an Omani writer and novelist

Translated by Badr al Dhafri
This is an adapted translation of the original article published in the print edition of the cultural supplement of the Oman Arabic newspaper on March 26.