Abstract
Hassan Najmi´s novel Gīrtrūd represents an example of the postmodern novel with its transtextual characters expressed fictionally. Hassan Najmi transforms the one-dimensional flat character, Mohammed, in Gertrude Stein´s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas into a three-dimensional dynamic character. In Gīrtrūd, the narrator Hassan becomes Mohammed´s voice – the very incarnation of Mohammed. They become each other´s double, fiction, reality, and mask of alterity. Through a kind of narrative game, the narrative voice – local form – reads, interprets and overwrites Western material/texts. As a postmodern novel, Hassan Najmi´s Gīrtrūd, narrates the story of Moroccan fiction in its complex relation to Western literature.
Keywords: novel, fiction, postmodernity, narrative game, bilingual identity