Conceptualizing Death: A Radial Network Analysis of Sadegh Hedayat

Abstract

Sadegh Hedayat’s works are among those in which the concept of “death” plays a central and multifaceted role. Previous studies have mostly examined this concept from psychological, social, stylistic, or intertextual perspectives, analyzing death as a theme or as a consequence of individual and collective crises. Adopting a cognitive semantic approach, the present study demonstrates that death in Buried Alive is not a fixed concept but a dynamic conceptual structure organized as a network of interconnected meanings. The theoretical framework employs radial categories and metaphorical extension, and the data are analyzed qualitatively based on an examination of linguistic and contextual uses of words and expressions related to death. The findings indicate that death in Buried Alive has a central semantic core—namely, the biological end of life—along with peripheral extensions that expand, through metaphor and the narrator’s emotional experience, into existential, psychological, and interpersonal domains. Accordingly, death in this work is not merely the subject of the narrative but also constitutes a cognitive framework through which the world and the lived experience of the main character are perceived. By focusing on meaning construction, this study offers a new perspective for the analysis of fundamental concepts in contemporary Persian narrative literature. Moreover, the analysis reveals that these semantic extensions continually shift depending on narrative context, highlighting the fluidity of the concept within the story world. Ultimately, the study argues that understanding death in Hedayat’s fiction requires attention not only to its thematic presence but also to its cognitive functions, which shape the reader’s engagement with the text.