Evidence and Claims Regarding the Narrative of Ghazi Al-Gosaibi's "Apartment of Freedom": A Study in the Structure of Digital Reception Argumentation

Abstract

This study aims to uncover the argumentative structure of digital reader reviews that support the claim that Ghazi Al-Qusaibi’s The Freedom Apartment (Shaqqat al-Hurriyah) is autobiographical. It examines how readers move from identifying clues both within and beyond the novel to constructing claims that link the fictional narrative to the author’s life. The study draws on a qualitative corpus consisting of thirty-four excerpts from reader reviews published on Goodreads, selected through criterion-based purposive sampling because of their direct relevance to the relationship between the novel and Al-Qusaibi’s life. Perelman’s theory of argumentation serves as the primary analytical framework, supplemented by qualitative content analysis for classifying the clues and by linguistic markers for tracing varying degrees of certainty, probability, and categorical assertion. The analysis reveals a range of clues employed by readers, most notably correspondences between the novel’s events and the author’s biography, the identification of fictional characters with the author or with real individuals, appeals to the perceived realism of events, the attribution of characters’ ideas and concerns to the author, reliance on external testimonies, and certain metanarrative and generic indicators. The findings further show that the strength of autobiographical attribution is determined not merely by the presence of a clue, but by the ways in which clues are ordered, combined, and transformed into inferential pathways. The author’s denial of the novel’s autobiographical character did not eliminate such suspicion; rather, in some reviews, it became a counter-discourse with which readers renegotiated through varying degrees of doubt, probability, and certainty. The study concludes that digital reception does more than interpret the literary text: it produces an argumentative discourse that reconstructs the relationship among author, literary work, and autobiography.