The identity crisis in Buf-e- kur, a consequence of the presence of modernity in a traditional society

With the advent of modernity in the traditional countries, it emerged a widespread and consequential contradiction in the mental and social lives of individuals, especially the intellectuals. The contemporary thinking man is in a difficult contrast when he compares the modern world. If the intellectual fails to find a middle way to understand the situation, there will be an identity crisis. Buf-e-kur, is an achievement of the confrontation of tradition and modernity in Iran. This article seeks to illustrate the implications of confronting tradition and modernity in this fiction with its author, Sadegh Hedayat. The narrator, who is in search of "individuality" and self-knowledge, reaches into the ignorance of himself and others. The astonishment, suspicion, and instability of the narrator and the story, the disorderliness and disruption of time and place, and the feeling of being too distant from society and self, reflect the narrator's identity crisis. This identity crisis, coupled with absurdity, self-loathing, and others-loathing, leads to the narrator's gradual and self-inflicted death. and, in the literary works such as Buf-e-kur, which did not exist in the pre-modern works, are other consequences of the controversy of the tradition and modernity. The confrontation between science and religion, which is in the form of a contrast between wisdom and superstition and the deformed religious beliefs, is another result of this controversy. All of these ideas can be found in Hedayat's character, but it can't be said that he was as absurdist as the narrator of his story.