A sociological criticism of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s story ‘The Setar’ with an ‎approach to the writer’s creativity and aesthetic techniques in the story

‘The Setar’ is a short story written by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad. This article, with an eclectic and combined method, aims at criticizing technical and aesthetic aspect of the work along with its social content, to show how the author utilized these elements in order to express social thoughts. Al-e-Ahmad is not an introverted writer who has fallen into his own minds and is ignorant of what goes on in society. He is a social and realistic person. The Setar represents part of the author's thoughts and criticizes him for some social damage, albeit indirectly, with the effect of satirical taste. The author depicts the conflict among religious extremist group, fanatical superficial observers, and one-dimensional artists, and, of course, guides the story in such a way to criticize the unaware, worldly, and fanatical religious group and provokes the reader to sympathize with the boy who plays setar (a music tool). In fact, the author complaints more about bigotry and instrumental utilization of religion and considers its adverse consequences as destructive. It is also a show of wealth and well-being of a number of people and the poverty of another group.In addition, the author criticizes beliefs and prejudices that have entered the society in the name of religion that must be broken and moderated. Human interest is a social issue that is of utmost importance in short stories. The writer is indifferent to the society and the educational system, human interests, contradictions and inconsistencies, and false calculations in his work. Characterization, tune, spatiation, description, conflict, suspension, complication and resolution, how to begin and end the story and other techniques of story writing, along with literary techniques, give a unique representation to the story, and make it interesting in terms of form and content. The element of ‘waiting’ which is considered to be the most important feature of the story, is extremely high. Al-e-Ahmadartistically utilized literary techniques such as humorous expression, repetition, paradox and simile and mixed his thoughts to art to make his story influential. The bitter satire used by the author to express social issues has made the story very attractive.It is hoped that this article could be a pattern, though incomplete, for similar cases and would complement and refine the next-generation scholars in order to provide more context for interaction between researchers in the fields of literature and sociology