One of the earliest representations of the outlaw activist in modern Arabic literature is Assad in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. Arrested for participating in a demonstration, Assad wants to evade both the law and marriage to a woman he doesn’t love. More recently, we find two literary characters within the Jordanian literary field whose uneasy relationship with the state and the cultural norms it engenders compels them to re-assess preconceived identifications of national, social, ethnic and ideological natures. Amjad Nasser’s Haythu la tasqut al-amtar, 2011 (Land of No Rain, 2014) never gives the land a name, but like Saudi Arabia in Munif’s City of Salt series, the reader readily recognizes the militarized monarchy and the land it rules as Jordanian. The protagonist, complicit in a failed assassination attempt, returns to his homeland after decades in exile, and the resulting novel is a poetic reflection on the consequences of dissent and the difficulty of rejoining the past with the present. Ramadan Rawashida clearly situates his novel Min hayat rajal faqid al-dhakirah, aw al-Hamrawi (1993, From the life of a man who lost his memory, or al-Hamrawi) in Jordan, and predominately in Amman. This novel’s protagonist is lost, in search of both his identity and his place in a society that rejects both ambiguity and dissent. The productive power of these two novels lies in a discourse that repudiates the simulacrum of unity necessary for state stability. The state reaction to instability is to disavow and hide it away in prison or exile. By thinking in terms of the destabilizing power of representation as articulated by Kenneth Burke, this paper scrutinizes how the representation of these characters challenges state stability by constructing narratives that embody the fragments of a “broken” national paradigm.