A Comparative Study of Style, Narrator, Setting, Tone, and Character Based on the Components of Socialist Realism in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s The Missing Soluch and Anna Seghers’s The Dead Stay Young

Abstract

This study aims to comparatively examine five major narrative components—style, narrator, setting, tone, and character—in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s The Missing Soluch and Anna Seghers’s The Dead Stay Young, with an emphasis on the characteristics of Socialist Realism. As a literary school, Socialist Realism seeks to portray the social and political realities of its time. Using a comparative-analytical approach, the present study investigates the narrative styles of the two novels and key elements such as character typification, the prominence of collectivist narration, emancipatory hope, and the depiction of social suffering. It compares these themes and identifies the major similarities and differences embedded within them. The findings demonstrate how the two authors, despite their distinct indigenous, cultural, and historical contexts, employ the framework of Socialist Realism to represent the suffering and aspirations of the lower social classes and to emphasize the role of collective will in confronting oppression. Both novels adopt a social and political perspective and, through a focus on characters and the complex relationships among them, depict diverse experiences of life. From the perspective of Socialist Realist aesthetics, the narrative structures of both works can be analyzed through their emphasis on realism, the use of a collective point of view, and the representation of the process of class consciousness. Ultimately, this study shows that Dowlatabadi and Seghers, in the absence of the conventional ideological constraints commonly associated with this literary doctrine, have succeeded in reconstructing the elements of Socialist Realism within indigenous, humanistic, and critical contexts.