Abdulrahman Munif is considered one of the most important Arab novelists in the 20th Century who best reflects the socio-political Arab status. He was born in Amman--Jordan in 1933 to a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother. He studied in Iraq until he was expelled from it after signing the Baghdad Alliance in 1955. He obtained his Ph.D. in oil economics from Belgrade. He lived most of his life in exile and spent his last days in Damascus--Syria. He remained a strong opponent to Imperialism and to Arab tyrannical regimes until his death in 24/01/2004. Most of his fiction can be considered a protest against the practices of tyrannical governments in Arab countries that propagate a culture of fear and defeat among their citizens by locking political prisoners behind bars and exposing them to different kinds of physical torture or by intimidating citizens and scaring them into submission, thus making them metaphorically prisoners in a large jail. Munif published several novels among which: The Land of Darkness (Ard Assawad), Cities of Salt (Modon Al-Milh), The Trees and the Assassination of Marzouq (Al-Ashjaar wa Ightiyal Marzouq), A World Without Maps (Aalam Bila Kharaet), and When We Left the Bridge (Indama Tarakna Al-Jisr). This article provides a close reading of Abdulrahman Munif's When We Left the Bridge (1976) as it aims to introduce it to the English reader who does not have access to this novel in Arabic and to familiarise him/her with it by translating several quotations cited from the Arabic text into English. It is hoped that after reading this article, probably the only criticism of the novel in English, the reader would feel as if he/she read the novel, understood and appreciated it. On the back cover of Munif's novel, George Tarabishi, a famous Syrian critic and translator, notes the similarity between Munif's novel and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man & The Sea in terms of subject matter as both literary works depict a hunter struggling to catch his precious prey. According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, Munif's "Cities of Salt quintet .... create an entire history of a broad region, evoking comparison's to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County" (Wikipedia). Such comparisons prove that Munif was influenced by Western English Literature. This article, however, compares/contrasts Munif's novel to other English literary texts such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1948), Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (1908), T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)--a comparison that has never been done before to the author's best knowledge, and one that proves the influence of these texts upon Munif's fiction as well as its modernity.
