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Vol. 13 No. 03 (2026)
Volume 13 Issue 03

Articles

THE CONCEPT OF SLENCE AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE IN THE PROSE OF CHINGIZ AITMATOV AND FRANZ KAFKA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Published 2026-03-06

  • Feruza Isoqovna Shoimova

Abstract

Silence, as a deliberate narrative strategy, constitutes one of the most productive yet underexamined devices in twentieth-century world fiction. This comparative study investigates the function of silence in the prose of the Kyrgyz-Soviet writer Chingiz Aitmatov (1928-2008) and the Czech-German modernist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), two authors whose literary worlds appear geographically and culturally remote yet converge remarkably at the level of narrative technique. Drawing on close textual analysis of Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980) and The White Steamship (1970), alongside Kafka's The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and The Metamorphosis (1915), this article identifies three primary functions of silence in both writers: communicative silence (the failure or refusal of language between characters), structural silence (narrative gaps and ellipses that generate meaning through omission), and existential silence (the metaphysical condition of characters confronting an indifferent or incomprehensible world). While Kafka deploys silence as an instrument of bureaucratic terror and ontological alienation rooted in Central European modernism, Aitmatov employs it as a vehicle for collective memory, ancestral trauma, and cultural dislocation within the Soviet ideological landscape. Despite these contextual differences, both authors construct silence not as an absence of meaning but as its most concentrated form, functioning as a counternarrative that subverts official discourse and recuperates suppressed human experience. The study contributes to the growing body of comparative research on silence in world literature and proposes a tripartite analytical framework applicable across cultural traditions.

Keywords

silence; narrative device; Chingiz Aitmatov; Franz Kafka; comparative literature; narratology; modernism; communicative failure; collective memory; existential alienation.

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References

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