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 The focus on time and temporality is of central importance for the fiction as well as literary criticism of the twentieth century. Georges Poulet (1901-1992) is a Belgian literary critic who opposed formalist approach criticism. He devoted the foundation of his critical-philosophical idea to the time category and studied the “perception” of the writers through their stories. Hushang Golshiri is an influential modern Iranian writer who explicates the question of identity and the perception of time in his works. All his characters, in one way or another, struggle against time. Drawing on a descriptive-analytic method and through Poulet’s theoretical lens, I will expound on Golshiri’s perception of the temporality of a transient instant. The personal space of characters in his stories is closely related to a perception of an instant through different temporal measures—for instance, the act of staying in the long lines, the narrator walking with people, focusing on the steps, etc. all trying to establish an interpersonal perception of time. Furthermore, the past memories in his stories constantly bleed into the present instant through different associations of sounds and images and therefore make the present instant eternal. The fragmented structures in Golshirir’s stories such as the repetitive water fountain or breaking of the small waves on a pool, while pointing to the transience of time, also draws attention to a notion of infinity. In other words, the repetitions, remembrances, and even the act of forgetting in his stories are all essential for constructing a notion of identity in relation to the transience of an instant.

Keywords: thematic criticism, Time, Identity, Georges Poulet, Hushang Golshiri

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