Examining Epistemic Anxiety as an Essential Principle of Social Life in the Modern World in Jamshid Khanian’s Young Adult Novel: A Pizza Box for the Grilled Trapezoid

Besides providing literary jouissance and entertainment, successful young adult fiction also pays attention to the educational aspect. In doing so, it paves the path for adolescents’ development as well as their entrance into social life. Fallibility and tolerance towards different viewpoints are significant instructive issues for adolescents while they move into their social lives. A Pizza Box for the Grilled Trapezoid by Jamshid Khanian is a notable novel dealing with epistemology and individual differences in the process of consciousness.  The novel narrates a small family’s short residence in an apartment full of weird events. Reading the novel, the readers formulate their hypotheses about the cause of these strange events and frequently reject them. As a result, the readers conclude that one cannot explain the whyness of events only by relying on the mind and experience. Employing a descriptive-analytical approach, the current study seeks to examine the fallibility of human beings as one of the fundamental principles of social life in the modern world in the novel under discussion. Accordingly, the idea of epistemic anxiety, seen as one of the intellectual foundations of the modern way of thinking, becomes the theoretical basis of the current study. The findings of the study indicate that the novelist brings to the fore the concept of epistemic anxiety by raising human beings’ fallibility in their perceptions along with its consequences, that is, readiness to constantly revise and reconstruct their beliefs and perspectives.