Utopian Dream and Dystopian Reality: An Analysis of Gibran Khalil’s The Prophet

Abstract

Abstract The present dissertation investigates the aspects of utopia and dystopia of Gibran Khalil’s The Prophet. Gibran has produced fictional world to condemn his society, and to define what could be the characteristics of an idealistic society. He carefully has chosen his main character Almustafa, a mixture of all religions and beliefs, to address humanity as a whole. He has created imaginary place for his utopian dream, which is the city of Orphalese. Although he came from different culture, he has tackled common social issues that are still debatable in our modern society, such as materialism and the restriction of individual freedom. He was concerned with what constitutes a utopian society and the necessary characteristics of an ideal nation. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis theory of literary criticism has been implemented in this study in order to extract all the textual and the meta-textual meanings and themes in the studied work. The Prophet is a utopian work that is written in dystopian time. Gibran’s dream of utopia, while related to his specific and different background, poses many questions. The analysis had demonstrated that The Prophet is the intersection of utopian dreams and dystopian realities.