Is Shahnon Ahmad’s Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan A Tragedy?

Halimah Mohamed Ali 
(School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia)

Abstract: Malaysia’s Shahnon Ahmad is a versatile writer. He has been a prominent literary figure in the arena of Malay literature. He is the voice of the masses. Through his fiction he is not afraid to portray the truth of the everyday Malaysian life. This is evident through many of his works. He talks about poverty, politics, religion and much more vis-à-vis his fiction. For the purpose of this paper one novel has been selected, Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (RSJ) (1966) or its translation, which will be used in this paper, No harvest but a thorn (1972) translated by Adibah Amin. This novel is very popular and it has also been turned into a movie, produced and acted by Malaysia’s famous and talented actress Sarimah in the 1980s. This paper will determine that the novel can be labelled as a tragedy. It uses the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle’s work the Poetics in the reading of this novel. The discussion juxtaposes Aristotle’s views of tragedy with the plot/events and characters that are portrayed in RSJ. It investigates whether the formula of the Greek tragedy is present in Shahnon Ahmad’s selected work.

Key words: Malaysia’s, Shahnon Ahmad, Aristotle, tragedy, Greek