Between the individual and collective self stands the narrative writing in the three texts that are the subject of this book, building its worlds from cracks in the Arab political and social body, represented in three Arab countries: Lebanon, and Beirut specifically through what Elias Khoury's novel "White Faces" depicts of narrative details of the civil war, and Syria, Damascus specifically, is present as a space for other spatial intersections that are occupied by the details of the narrative in Haidar Haidar's novel "The Desolate Time", and a narrative world that expands to contain scenes and manifestations of the June 1967 war through other intersections centered on the Jordan River, and the Palestinian issue through the ramifications of the narrative narrative, just as Halim Barakat's novel "The Return of the Bird to the Sea" accomplishes its multi-textual and multi-meaning discourse.