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Abstrak
Words are no longer just a means of communication; there are other tools and mechanisms for people to connect and interact. What are most important from this perspective are non-verbal communication and its role in narratives, carrying significant semiotic meanings alongside verbal communication.
The novel, as a literary genre, is extremely remarkable and important in portraying the realities and discourses present in societies. It has attracted all communicative types, rhetorical techniques, and stylistic methods from other literary and visual arts. Novelists, due to the multiple artistic purposes such as completion, diversification, execution, refinement, emphasis, and embodiment, use non-verbal communication mechanisms; these include facial expressions, hand and body movements, and other gestures and non-verbal signals.
This study, in turn, attempts to examine this significant semiotic phenomenon in the novel 'Night Mail' by Hoda Barakat, winner of the Booker Prize, in order to uncover the extent to which these tools are employed, the functions they serve within the text, and the reasons that necessitated their use in depicting states of fear, anxiety, loneliness, escape, occupation, and war conditions that Lebanese, Syrians, and Iraqis have recently endured or in the modern era as a whole.
This novel used the epistolary form for narration and to convey thoughts and conversations. Due to the importance of the letters and the transmission of content, it benefited from non-verbal communication mechanisms alongside verbal communication mechanisms. The conclusion reached is that the Lebanese novelist, who used letters as an important tool to deliver her novel and the contained opinions and content—from isolation, alienation, loneliness, nostalgia, despair, displacement, war, and destruction to the reader—employed various non-verbal methods, such as expressions of the body, hands, eyes, face, and others, to convey significant content and opinions in the novel.