Sadegh Hedayat’s The Pilgrim, A Work beyond Political Discourses

Sadegh Hedayat wrote The Pilgrim (1945) based on and shortly after the historical and political events of the final years of Reza Shah’s government and early years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. The article adopts the method of critical discourse analysis, as formulated by Ruth Wodak, James Paul Gee, and Norman Fairclough, to study the novel and analyze its author’s views on the political discourses of the aforementioned period in order to determine which political discourse or discourses influenced the novel. It is possible to consider the novel politically as a meta-discursive, non-discursive or non-ideological work in which political discourses, such as kingdom, nationalism, fascism, modernism, Westernization, secularism, traditionalism and religiosity, leftism (Marxism and communism), liberalism, democracy, and constitutionalism are criticized by the author. Political ideologies are utilized to secure the interests of their advocates and propagandists. Hedayat experienced many historical and political changes from the Constitutional Revolution to the period of Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah and saw the instability politicians, rulers, and profiteers. He mixed up these events with a furious satire and created a political novel. We cannot fully comprehend the novel without having knowledge of the political events and currents of the writer’s period and his political tendencies.