Tahar Ben Jelloun’s fictional account of the end of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life in the short story “By Fire,” depicts the social and economic contradictions leading to the main character’s misery and eventual self-immolation. At several moments in the narrative, Jelloun juxtaposes first nature (ecological processes) and second nature (social processes), in a way that highlights the “unnaturalness” of Bouazizi’s social and economic situation, in particular his inability to labor. The narrative very briefly, but significantly, transcends the social in order to observe laboring ants or birds, effectively contrasting the differing claims made by passing characters that Bouazizi’s situation is somehow “natural.” Yet what does the form of this fictional account depict about the “naturalness” of the social situation depicted? In making such a contrast between the natural and the social, it is difficult to understand how the social could begin to approach the natural or transcend the social situation depicted. When the situation appears impossible to transcend, the effect could be that the characters appear as social products of an inevitable or natural force. Georg Lukacs in his essay “Reportage or Portrayal” discusses the effect of the form of reportage used as a creative method in literature, in that the outcome is seen as a “finished product, not a moment in process and development, in constant and vital interaction with its preconditions and consequences…. (53). In this type of literature the resulting effect is that the main character is mostly static, incapable of resistance and eventually completely objectified by the system. Though “By Fire” clearly does not aim to be literary reportage, there are aspects of the narrative that incorporate Lukacsian “reportage” stylistically. If fiction is different from non-fiction in that it is free to imagine change or redemption, how effectively does Jelloun do so in this short story?