The motif of the search for happiness in Khaled Hosseini’s novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns”

The aim of this research is to reconstruct the narrative integrity of the artistic world of Khaled Hosseini’s novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” through a functional-semantic analysis of the motif of the search for happiness. The article analyzes the poetics of Hosseini’s novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” in the context of the ideological and plot-image representation of the motif of the search for happiness. Also included in the focus of attention are such features of poetics as the spatio-temporal paradigm, the features of the plot-compositional structure, and the system of characters. The semantic center of the work under consideration is the history of Afghanistan through the narrative of women’s destinies. Consequently, the interrelationship of the particular and the general, the personal and the historical, is explicated. The present study contributes to the scholarship of the contemporary literary process, since the poetics of the work chosen for analysis are investigated both from the point of view of content (poetics of the motif, female images, thematic and figurative layers) and ethno-cultural axiology. This determines the scientific originality of the research. Afghanistan appears as a marked space. As a result, it is proven that the motif of the search for happiness in the novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” forms a semantic field, in the space of which the author’s worldview manifests itself as a subjective image of reality, determined by the specificity of artistic thinking and the creator’s individual-personal experience.