Abdullah F. Al-Badarneh’s scientific contributions

This study examines the archetypal stages of human responses to fear and anxiety during pandemics and epidemics in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Amir Tag Elsir’s Ebola 76, and COVID-19. Pandemics and epidemics elicit a range of psychosocial response mechanisms in individuals due to innate and unmanageable feelings of fear and uncertainty. In the face of chaotic circumstances, the human collective psyche exhibits contagious horrors that are both random and overwhelming. However, these reactions follow historically patterned prototypical stages that significantly disrupt human ontological existence's apparent peace, harmony, and rhythm. The manifestation of this division became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly during periods of confinement, when the fear of the virus gradually infiltrated even the smallest aspects of social life. Notably, the selected narratives accurately depict the various stages of human responses to pandemics. The stages are represented in Poe’s story as disapprobation, surprise, horror, and disgust, and in Elsir’s novel as shock, denial, acceptance, and hope. These phases unveil a comprehensive and emotional engagement with the human experience of pandemics and epidemics, offering a descriptive and anticipatory portrayal of the imminent social, psychological, and cultural calamities when the COVID-19 pandemic began to unpredictably ravage the world.

This article examines the absurdity of wars and grounds their intersecting contours of enormous death (physical and psychological), destruction, and trauma notwithstanding their location, grounds, pretext, or repercussions. It underlines the scathing critiques of their constituencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, trans. 2018), two novels articulating a striking disdain for the ethics and myths of the so-called “just wars.” The researchers, sharing the novelists’ moral qualms about wars, bring these two novels together in a potent critique uncovering the cruelties of wars, which have led to the dislodgement and demise of millions of people all over the world, not to mention the psychological insecurities and anxieties instigated by war. To illustrate, the horrible car bomb explosions besetting Baghdad in the aftermath of the 2003-American invasion of Iraq are equated with the Allies’ firebombing and leveling of Dresden in Eastern Germany. Hence, Dresden and Baghdad lapse into waves of horror and massacres committed in the name of justice, and Vonnegut and Saadawi, whose awfully poignant firsthand war experiences enticed them to foreground the tragedies of war, interweave nonlinear antiwar narratives reminiscent of the mismatched body of Whatsitsname in Frankenstein in Baghdad and Billy Pilgrim’s disheveled appearance and lack of training as a soldier in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.