Abstract
Rukhsana Ahmad’s short story “The Gatekeeper’s Wife” maps the plight of a
western woman, Annette, who is married to a wealthy man in Lahore. Despite
living in an affluent and luxurious environment, she finds herself alienated and
secluded. To escape the burthen of her lonely life, she keeps herself busy with
animals at the zoo. To her utter bewilderment, one day she finds a woman
stealing meat from the cage of a wild cheetah. For all its seemingly mysterious
nature of the subsequent episode, the story invokes Annette’s existentialist
sojourn into the unfathomable South Asian mystique. This paper explores that
Annette gets awareness of her own existence in the time of her own inner
emotional strain and anxiety. The paper analysis existentialist impacts on the
story from the views of two major exponents of existentialism; Soren Kierkegaard
(1813-55) and Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980).
Syed Hanif Rasool, Jahangir Khan, Fasih Ur Rahman. (2019) Rukhsana Ahmad’s “The Gatekeeper’s Wife”: An Existentialist Study of a Western Woman’s Experience of the South Asian Mystique, Putaj Humanities And Social Science, Volume-26, Issue-1.
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