Saba Mohaghegh - MA Student of English Literature Shahid Beheshti University Tehran, Iran

Abstract—Fariba Vafi’s novel, The Bird, portrays a woman who is caught between tradition and modernity in contemporary Iran. The protagonist of the novel is a young woman who narrates her struggles with her husband, children, siblings, and parents. But most importantly, it recounts her mental conflicts with the person she should be and the woman she essentially is. This article aims to reflect the reader's feelings and thoughts toward this book. The reader is me, a young unmarried woman living in Iran and craving to be free from the claws of traditions. Louise Rosenblatt believes that the readers' feelings and memories which are stimulated in the process of reading a literary text are important since they are the means through which we can make sense of the text. By reading this book, love, hate, pity, and fear were experienced by me as a reader. Moreover, Wolfgang Iser believes that there are certain gaps in a literary work and they are filled by the reader, based on his/her thoughts, feelings, and experiences to create constancy for the text. This is crucial since it provokes the reader’s imagination. In this article, through my imagination, I tried to make the novel more consistent by imagining the protagonist's feelings toward her father and the effects of their relationship on her marriage.

Fariba Vafi; My Bird; Reader-Oriented Approach; Louise Rosenblatt; Wolfgang Iser; Love; Hate; Pity; Fear