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This article anatomizes the depiction of the dictator's mind-set and psyche in Yasmina Khadra's The Dictator's Last Night (2015). Using the first person, Khadra attempts to give an inside insight into the mind of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, one of the most colorful, controversial and complex figures of recent history. The selected novel broadens our understanding by offering a psychiatric diagnosis of the dictator. This paper thus explores how the author delves into the dictator's mind mapping literary psychopathology of Gaddafi's personality through realistic reconstructions. In other words, we attempt to explain how the dictator manifests the symptoms of one who is trapped in a destructive state of mind using the novel as a focal point and guide. The paper tries to put flesh on the bones of questions concerning Gaddafi's mind-set and absolute power wedded to madness and megalomania as well as reflecting upon certain images and symbols utilized to show historically or in mythic form the hyperbolic figure of the dictator that forms the central theme in the novel. To make the journey inside the dictator's mind possible, the article uses a psychoanalytic approach and refers to historical facts to back up the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reading of Yasmina Khadra's Wolf Dreams (2003) evoking important questions on the nature of terrorism in Algeria during the black decade of the 1990s. The novel describes the rise of fundamentalism and how young men are transformed into religious fanatics. This paper is interested in the literary function of terrorism; i.e. how terrorism is used as a literary tool and why this novelist chooses it as a main structuring element. This study offers a more adequate account of terrorism's figurative aspects, it clarifies the writer's stylistic strategies and his use of techniques such as narrative suspense, metaphors, and figurative language to respond to instances of violence in this era. The paper also examines ways in which Khadra's Wolf Dreams can help broaden understandings of terrorism in Algeria. It emphasizes especially the responses to terrorism and considers the status of literature as a way to get knowledge about the atrocities of war. Our objective is to map how Khadra engages terrorism in his novel and uses his literary historical imagination to provide a coherent narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]