Morphology of the story of Mehr -va- Māh
Subject Areas : Research in Iranian classical literatureKeywords: Mehr -va- Māh Morphology Chain of structures Fairytale,
Abstract :
In order to focus on the analysis of the Mehr -o- Māh story in this paper, a number of issues, literature reviews and different versions of narratives as well as fiction structures and its elements are rendered. Moreover, it is considered to review some related topics such as language, character, narrator, the point of view, the structure chain and plot, theme, setting and time. As a result, the whole book considered as a long story with numerous characters promoting the events. The structure of the sentences and its style of writing are uncomplicated and technical simultaneously. Furthermore, 45 characters with usually proper names play a role in the narrative, while most of them are magicians and fairies (24.30 %) or women and girls (22.2 %). The narrator, additionally, is unclear and vague, so the story is narrated in the third person point of view. The paper aims to study the story based on the 31 acts which mentioned by Propp and also considering his classification in 6 stages, including preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return, recognition. At the end, it is worth mentioning to know that narrative pattern of the story is as following: α γ φ δ β ↑ ε λ F A C λ E G G K D H F C B E B O λ H K M Ex φ Pr U K E Pr O T L K W QN I Rs ↓ Moreover, the characters could be classified in 7 distinct groups of act, which extraordinary events as the main elements of the story play a great role. In more details, the time of the narrative is unclear; some of the locations are realistic, while some of them virtual, such as China, India, Mecca, Sham, Egypt and Morocco.