Employment of the documentary and the imaginary in the novel The Sleepwalkers

Saad Makkawi in The Sleepwalkers did not fall under the control of the historical source completely in its employment of its characters, but rather combined the historical part with the contemporary part. He creates a story based on a historical event and a realistic, documentary vision, but he knew how to benefit from history with its characters and events, and how to select from the events what corresponds to the nature of his purpose and goals. In choosing the historical stage with intelligence and conciliation, we enabled the writer to say his word in the social, economic and political reality that he was living in, and perhaps this is what gave his novel a special flavor, and made critics puzzled over its classification in the light of traditional theories, a historical novel that is similar to what Muhammad Saeed Al-Arian, Ali Al-Jarim, Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid and Ali Ahmed Bakathir were writing, or do you see it as a novel with a social vision and its author has a political position, or is it a pure artistic work, as the writer was subjecting his material to the artistic will and point of view, and he was not subject to the historical material that was available to him .
A large number of events, personalities, and conflicts revolved around the axis of the fictional work, which ranged between different societies and environments (Haret Hammam in the Khayamiya neighborhood, the mountain castle, the princes’ palaces and their prisons, and the village of Mit Juhayna), and despite this, the writer was able to invest These facts are in his inauguration of his novelist architecture and the formulation of his artistic form, although he did not fully adhere to the facts of history, such as the end of al-Ghuri, for example, and he also manipulated the historical time in favor of the fictional time. Satisfaction with his rule as a break in the vicious cycle of injustice, which quickly converged after him again to continue its terrible cycle, and at the same time he stopped at the only night spent by Khair Bey in power, which equals his treatment of the entire period of Qaytbay's rule.