Religious Dilemma and Identity Crisis in Saud Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (2015)

Abstract

The current paper aims to investigate the religious identity crisis in the themes of Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (2015). It also determines to explore the kinds of the identity status depicted in the novel as well as the causes of identity loss. The paper takes the qualitative approach for data interpretation and adopts the descriptive discourse analysis (DDA) method. The analysis is then guided by the intercultural communication theory (ICT). The paper found that the protagonist and some other characters face identity crisis and suffer from religious dilemma due to several reasons the most of which is the dominance of the socio-class norms that prevents religion from playing its role in making its adherents equal. The paper also confirms the negative effect of hybridization on the religious identity formation. It reinforces the validity of the application of ICT on fictive data and contributes new form of IC analysis on fictive data.