A comparative literature study of burnout in Buchari, a character in Asrul Sani’s Oktober 1945
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This study examines the representation of burnout in Buchari, a character in Asrul Sani’s short story “Oktober 1945,” through a comparative literature perspective that brings literary representation into dialogue with psychological concepts. The study employs a qualitative descriptive approach using close textual reading and interdisciplinary comparison. The primary data consist of narration, dialogue, metaphors, bodily imagery, and existential expressions associated with Buchari, while the analytical framework draws on comparative literature, literary psychology, Maslach and Leiter’s burnout model, Frankl’s existential perspective, and theories of stress and war trauma. The findings show that Buchari’s burnout develops progressively from emotional exhaustion to psychological distancing, diminished agency and self-evaluation, and finally an existential crisis of meaning. Literary language renders these processes through metaphors of bodily fatigue, shrinkage, paralysis of will, estrangement from the body, and life-death paradoxes. The comparative perspective demonstrates a dialogical relationship: psychology provides conceptual categories for identifying patterns of exhaustion, whereas literature expands those categories by embodying alienation, identity crisis, and existential struggle as concrete human experience.
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