Asian Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Studies

This study comparatively examines how social decline, otherness, and identity are represented in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Although both works have been widely discussed in relation to historical change, power, and moral conflict, less attention has been given to the ways in which weakening structures of authority reshape identity through symbolic space. Using qualitative comparative literary analysis, the study applies close reading informed by new historicist and postcolonial perspectives. The analysis focuses on institutional decline, identity formation, symbolic space, and the relationship between individual agency and structural complicity. In The Cherry Orchard, the sale and destruction of the orchard signify the erosion of aristocratic privilege, inherited memory, and cultural authority, while Lopakhin’s rise reveals the tensions between economic mobility and social belonging. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Empire sustains its authority by constructing culturally diverse frontier communities as a threatening Other, and the Magistrate’s moral conflict exposes the instability of imperial power. The orchard and the desert function as contrasting symbolic spaces: the orchard preserves memory while revealing the historical burden of privilege, whereas the desert exposes territorial uncertainty, restricted imperial knowledge, and coercive classification. The comparison shows that decline is represented not as a single universal process but as historically distinct forms of social and moral instability. By bringing the two works together, the study demonstrates how changing relations of property, territory, memory, and power unsettle personal identity, cultural belonging, and ethical responsibility across different literary and historical contexts.