خوانش واساز از داستان "مردی که نفسش را کشت" صادق هدایت

Sadeq Hedayat has written many stories of which the most important and criticized work and the one he is famous for is The Blind Owl. Not enough attention has been given to his other stories. In this essay, I am going to throw light on one of his short stories called The Man Who Killed His Soul. This short story has not been discussed or worked on enough. Different approaches can be applied to it; the one I have chosen is the deconstructive reading. This came to my mind by reading the title because it consists of the major binary opposition of the text, which is body/soul. I have found several other binaries that restrict the meaning of the story. I would like to challenge the established and fixed worldviews of the author, the people of that time, and the characters and show the undecidability of meaning in the text. Although Hedayat has said: “The writer who writes for or against an idea or a group of people has in fact ruined his work” (Mostafavy 67), it can be clearly understood that he approves or disapproves of some ideas or people. I also want to demonstrate that if we accept that all of the binary oppositions supplement each other and neither is privileged over the other, we would have a better world. “A deconstructor begins textual analysis by assuming that a text has multiple interpretations and that it allows itself to be reread and thus reinterpreted countless times” (Bressler 126).