Just a Dream James Angel

"[She] starts to sort it out, to turn over the day, scraps, feelings, words and laughter, all are like a thin layer of rubbish that [she] gathers up and throws into the basket" (9). In A.B. Yehoshua's novel The Lover, Asya utilizes dreams to release her inner-tensions. Yehoshua employs Asya's dreams as symbolic, prophetic mechanisms that parallel the subtle, emotional conflicts within the characters and her self.

Once Asya is deprived of her lover, Gabriel, she is consumed by his absence and immediately begins to dream about him. The first of Asya's dreams described in the novel reflects her unconscious desire to reunite with Gabriel and abandon her family. The dream places Asya within a military encampment as an educator on a fieldtrip, paralleling Gabriel's own military excursion (14). Like the dreamer, the reader is also unable to make the connection between the dream and Gabriel, because both are uncertain of Gabriel's military career at the novel's onset. "The faces of children from Dafi's class" that Asya encounters are analogous to the "young, boyish faced" men in Gabriel's platoon (14, 297). While Dafi's class attends compulsory education, the soldiers...