ABSTRACT
Many of Hassan Blasim’s short stories fall into a broad category of unnatural narrative. This chapter, first of all, attempts to reveal such unnatural worldmaking strategies adopted by Blasim as dead narrators, conflicting events, and ontological metalepsis. Second, it tries to analyze a set of unnatural acts closely related to characters’ deaths and their consequential corporeal impairments. Third, it examines the mentality of Blasim’s characters by focusing on a particular type of unnatural mind – paranoia mind, which in radical cases involves two conflicting minds simultaneously emergent in one character. By resorting to unnatural narratives, Blasim makes his short stories anti-mimetically impossible but nightmarishly real, which not only generates effects of defamiliarity and horror but also forces us to ponder what is now happening in the seemingly remote parts of the world and raises our common concerns for human suffering.
