Death in the Prism of Existentialism: A Comparative Reading of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient Stone

In this article, I compare William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient ‎Stone ‎with respect to the theme of death and from the perspective of Existentialism. I argue that ‎despite ‎Faulkner’s influence on Chubak and similarities in their writings, the Iranian modernist novel ‎presents ‎intellectual and aesthetic nuances catering to the domestic material circumstances of ‎its ‎composition. While As I Lay Dying offers a pro- Sartrean and nihilistic notion of mortality, the ‎Iranian ‎novel features a pro- Heideggerian and authenticating view of death. I use this comparison ‎in order to ‎transcend the notion of modern Iranian literature as merely influenced by Western literary ‎models.‎