Sadeq Hedayat’s Death Awareness: Psychological or Philosophical attitude?
Subject Areas : Research in Iranian classical literature
1 -
Keywords: instinct death Eros life Hedayat Freud,
Abstract :
Many critics believe that Hedayat drives characters of his fictions to death, and this is something arising from his death aware mentality and his pessimistic attitude to life. There are some problems with Critical studies of Hedayat’s stories. First, they see the works full of philosophical despair. Secondly, they treat the protagonists as mirroring the character of the author. However, delving in motives of Hedayat’s stories, one can be suspicious about philosophical treatment of death of the fictional characters. Hedayat is among the writers who have especial approach to reveal psychological aspects of the characters in narrative structure of his stories. According to Freud theory of instincts, human behavior was motivated by two biologically energized instincts, respectively termed Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. When the life instinct decays as a result of failure, the death instinct takes the place of it. The research tries to study the stories in this framework.
