Against Oblivion: Gamal El-Ghitany's “Tales of the Stranger” and Anne Nelson's The Guys.

Abstract

This paper offers a comparative reading of Gamal El-Ghitany’s “Tales of the Stranger” (1974) and Anne Nelson’s The Guys (2002) as literary responses to collective trauma shaped by war and national crisis. Examining the 1973 October War and the September 11 attacks respectively, the study explores how both texts construct ordinary individuals as figures of moral heroism through absence, memory, and testimony. Drawing on concepts of war literature and post-traumatic representation, the paper argues that each work transforms real historical events into narratives that negotiate grief, identity, and communal meaning. While The Guys functions primarily as therapeutic post-9/11 theatre centered on mourning and national healing, El-Ghitany’s story expands beyond documentation to offer a broader political and humanistic vision. Through the device of absent protagonists and the interplay between reality and fiction, both works memorialize the “truly great” while revealing differing cultural approaches to trauma, remembrance, and historical understanding.