Constructing moral rejection: A stylistic analysis of Tayeb Salih’s A Handful of Dates

Abstract

This article examines how Tayeb Salih’s A Handful of Dates constructs a young narrator’s changing view of his grandfather. Existing studies have discussed the story through children’s psychological response, initiation, piety, and formalist interpretation, but less attention has been given to how several stylistic features work together across the narrative to produce the movement from admiration to rejection. Using qualitative close reading, the study draws on four dimensions of prose stylistics: narrative viewpoint, lexical-semantic patterning, agency and transitivity, and foregrounding. The analysis traces the narrator’s initial idealization of his grandfather, the shift produced by the revelation concerning Masood’s land, the material representation of the harvest and debt, the foregrounded image of “the heart of the palm” (Salih, 1999, p. 26), and the final rejection of the dates. The findings show that moral rejection develops cumulatively: changes in viewpoint are reinforced by patterns of possession, material action, and bodily response. The final vomiting of the dates therefore functions as a foregrounded embodied response to a moral re-evaluation already prepared by the narrative. The study contributes an integrated stylistic account of how moral perception is constructed through textual form.