AbstractThis study explores how the rhetoric of disquiet is staged in Omaima Al-Khamis’s novel Al-Warifah across multiple textual levels. It begins with the highly charged opening scene, dense with images of disturbance, anxiety, and apprehension, then moves to the narrative discourse, which oscillates between an ostensibly reconciled surface and a covertly oppositional layer, as the narrator withdraws, the third-person voice takes over, and devices such as dreams and luminous halos expose the heroine’s inner unrest and contradictions. At the level of the body, the novel’s imagery reveals a cultural discourse governing a conflicted relationship with the female body, presenting it in clashing postures shaped by the man’s presence or absence—between harmony and openness on the one hand, and fragility and instability on the other. Spatially, “Bayt Alishah” appears as a disturbed quasi-character that seeks to discipline its inhabitants, while temporally the work adopts a fractured emotional time structured by associative memory and flashback rather than linear sequence. Finally, the study shows how antithesis and irony, grounded in semantic tension and dissonance, further inscribe disquiet into the novel’s aesthetic and symbolic space.