War Metaphors on the Ground of Culture(A Case Study of ‘When the moonlight disappeared’)

The cultural ground of metaphors has been one of the important topics in metaphor studies in the past few decades and has always been a primary focus of metaphor researchers. In the current research, which aims to investigate the relationship between metaphor and culture, the metaphorical conceptualization of topics related to the war in the book "When the moonlight disappeared" (Hessam, 2014) has been studied with regard to the cultural context of the society. The analysis of metaphors used to express concepts such as war, front, martyrdom, and insider and enemy forces within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993) shows that the author has used several conceptual metaphors to express these concepts most of which have a cultural ground and are influenced by the author's Islamic attitudes and beliefs. Among these metaphors are "martyrdom is a journey/flight/path", "martyrdom is an exam", "martyrdom is a wage", "the front is Karbala" and "the front is heaven/hell". These findings, in line with the view of cognitive linguists, show that metaphors have a cultural basis in addition to bodily basis, and one way to know a culture is to know its cultural metaphors.