Mustafa Saeed and Jean Morris as National Allegories Batrishia Rakhim College

The toxic and destructive nature of Mustafa Saeed’s relationship with Jean Morris is not fully revealed until the end of the novel. The startling extent of their unnatural and twisted romance steadily raises both tension and thrill for the reader until the climax of Jean Morris’ death. Throughout this flashback recounted within the narrator’s subconscious, the two lovers – Mustafa and Jean – reveal personalities and exert behaviours that strikingly resemble that of the oppressor and the oppressed. To correlate with the novel’s theme of colonialism, it can be inferred that the lovers represent the colonizer and the colonized, therefore resulting in the possibility of interpreting the two characters as national allegories. Undoubtedly, Mustafa Saeed symbolizes the colonized and is thus an allegory of Sudan, or even perhaps any other colony. Jean, on the other hand, symbolizes the colonizer and can be regarded as an allegory of British Colonialism.

From the very early stages of their acquaintanceship, Jean is described to have immediately and instinctively begun to treat Mustafa with contempt, establishing her sense of superiority from the very beginning with “a look of arrogance” and “coldness.” Mustafa informs the narrator that...