Lost and Found: Journeys of Displacement and Belonging in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach

Abstract

This paper explores the intertwined themes of displacement, identity, and belonging in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. Although the two texts emerge from vastly different literary traditions, Gurnah’s postcolonial realism and Dahl’s children’s fantasy both chart journeys from alienation to belonging through the act of storytelling. In By the Sea, Gurnah portrays the alienated consciousness of Saleh Omar, whose search for home becomes an ethical and emotional quest shaped by memory, loss, and the pursuit of reconciliation. The sea functions as a marginal space between homeland and exile, symbolizing the fragility of belonging in a postcolonial world. In contrast, Dahl translates displacement into the imaginative idiom of childhood; James Trotter’s voyage inside the giant peach reimagines exile as liberation and the formation of community as healing. Through comparative analysis, this study reveals how both authors employ narrative, whether confessional or fantastical, as a means of reconstructing identity amidst dislocation. The paper argues that Gurnah’s realism and Dahl’s fantasy converge in their vision of storytelling as a search for home, where empathy and imagination redeem the fragmented self. Ultimately, both works illuminate the universal human struggle to transform loss into renewal and alienation into a sense of belonging.