Moral ambiguity and the collapse of ethical certainty in nazar eshonqul’s maymun yetaklagan odam and other stories

This article examines the theme of moral ambivalence and the collapse of ethical certainty in the short stories of a modern Uzbek writer, Nazar Eshonqul, in particular the story Maymun yetaklagan odam (The Man Led by a Monkey). Drawing on the ideas of existentialist philosophy (Camus, Sartre), post-Soviet morality (Bauman) and postmodern literature (Booth, Hutcheon), this article investigates moral cognition in crisis, which is characteristic of the post-Soviet Central Asian experience, which Eshonqul’s narrative landscapes express. Through textual analysis of the psychology of characters, symbolic images and narrative structure, this article illustrates how Eshonqul constructs a literary universe where the easy binary between good and evil vanishes in an irreconcilable grey area of moral paralysis. The main character, an aging, embittered artist whose flow of life gradually shifts between revolutionary idealism and existential despair, is an allegory of the moral exhaustion of modernity. The framing device of the story, two contrasting paintings (a young man taking a monkey from the forest vs. an old man being taken back into darkness by the same animal), is a powerful metaphor for the reversal of civilizational progress and the return to moral primitivism. This analysis shows how Eshonqul’s work is part of a larger Central Asian literary discourse on the questions of post-Soviet identity, historical trauma and the challenge of ethical decision-making in societies characterized by ideological disillusionment.