Metaphor and its Existential Origins in ‘The Stray Dog’

Many writers have found animals as a suitable and complete mirror of human subject and have expressed human subject in the form of animals. This theme has been a dominant one in the world literature and finding and considering the human subject in an animal and giving human characteristics to it brings to mind the literary device of metaphor. Hedayat in Stray Dog considers a dog as a suitable and complete mirror of the human subject and makes use of metaphor for philosophical and existentialist purposes. Metaphor gives Hedayat the chance to express pain and loneliness of human subject so as to place a great deal of emphasis on the loneliness of human subject. This is done through defamiliarization and a sense of wonder which is the function of literature itself. The methodology of this paper is based on Jacobson’s theory of metaphor which acts on basis of similarity, substitution, equivalence or contrast.