VOICES FROM THE MARGINS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOCIAL INDIFFERENCE AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE FICTION OF STEPHEN KING AND NAZAR ESHONQUL
Keywords:
Stephen King; Nazar Eshonqul; social indifference; social criticism; comparative literature; horror fiction; Uzbek modernism; allegory; collective trauma; alienation.Abstract
This article undertakes a comparative-typological analysis of two writers who, despite belonging to markedly different cultural and literary traditions, converge in their sustained artistic interrogation of social indifference and moral erosion: the American writer Stephen King and the Uzbek writer Nazar Eshonqul. While King is conventionally classified within the genre of horror fiction and Eshonqul within postmodern and modernist Uzbek prose, both authors deploy the fantastic, the grotesque, and the mythopoetic not as ends in themselves but as instruments for exposing the complicity of communities, institutions, and individuals in the suffering of the vulnerable. Drawing on close reading of representative works — King’s It, Pet Sematary, Needful Things, and The Institute, and Eshonqul’s Urush Odamlari (People of War), Maymun Yetaklagan Odam (The Man Led by a Monkey), and Go‘ro‘g‘li Yoxud Hayot Suvi (Gorogly, or the Water of Life) — the study identifies shared strategies of allegorical displacement, symbolic monstrosity, and narrative silence, alongside divergences rooted in each writer’s historical and cultural positioning: King’s critique of small-town American consumerism and collective amnesia versus Eshonqul’s reckoning with Soviet and post-Soviet dehumanization, historical trauma, and the erosion of Sufi-inflected humanist values. The article argues that both bodies of work constitute a form of ethical realism disguised as genre fiction, in which the monstrous or the mythic functions as a diagnostic mirror held up to society’s own negligence.
References
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