From Kafka’s existentialism to Hosseini’s surrealism

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 -Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature at University of Guilan

2 Faculty of Persian language and literature, University of Guilan, Iran

10.29252/kavosh.2025.21942.3601

Abstract

A bridge can serve as a link between the fictions of two lands, leading to a universal thinking. On one side, there is a short story by Franz Kafka, and, on the other, there is the first long philosophical story by Iranian writer Ghodsi Hosseini. In Hosseini's story, a woman begins a spiritual journey alongside her physical journey from Germany to Canada to visit her ailing sister. The author attempts to transform the despair of Kafka's existential bridge by finding herself in Lacan's "big Other" within a surreal and meaningful space as she crosses the bridge. This research employs a semiotic approach with a descriptive-analytical method to examine the two homonymous stories. As it demonstrates, there is a significant coherence among the elements of speech to convey a unified message in Kafka's "The Bridge", highlighting aspects of existentialism. In contrast, the diversity of the symbols and extensive intertextual references in Hosseini's "The Bridge" increases the number of the messages in the text. Although the bridge in Kafka's work is transformed from object to subject and remains a passage in Hosseini's story, there are other elements that indicate the intermingling of object and subject, which represents the hidden self of the subject in the safe haven of the object. This may be the most important ground between the two different narratives of the bridge.

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References

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Journal of Kavoshnameh in Persian Language and Literature
Volume 26, Issue 65 - Serial Number 65
September 2025
Pages 157-193

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