The Concepts of Good and Evil in Literary Texts: A Linguistic and Cultural Perspective

The article examines how the concepts of good and evil are expressed in literary texts and how their linguistic expression depends on cultural values. Such texts rarely name good and evil directly; they convey them through evaluative vocabulary, culture-specific words, metaphor, and the consequences of characters’ actions in the plot. The material is drawn from three novels by Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns and And the Mountains Echoed, which are written in English but rooted in Afghan culture. The study uses conceptual analysis, contextual and interpretive analysis, and the identification of metaphor, and it relies on linguocultural and cognitive theories of the concept. The analysis distinguishes four layers in the representation of the two concepts: lexical-evaluative, culture-specific, figurative, and narrative. Four observations follow. Theft serves as the core of the concept of evil. Honour and shame link individual morality to the family and the community. Good is presented as an act of restoration rather than as a fixed quality. Finally, the opposition of good and evil is softened by ambivalent characters and by a Sufi view that goes beyond the moral binary. The study is qualitative and reports no frequency counts.