narrative program

One of the most important elements of Patrick Modiano's novels is the investigation of identity. A Trace of Malice begins and ends with distance from the identity. This article tends to find why the identity issu in the initial situation, which has led to some investigations in actions happened in the past, is different from the identity issu at the end of the novel. In order to answer this question, we use the narrative programs and the model of actors by Algirad Greimas. So, the text has been divided into three different structures : surface structure, functional structure and semiotics structure. In semiotics structure, we cut up the text into some sequences; each sequence is considered like a sample of whole text. It seems that what we can find in each sequence exists in whole text. At the end, we have presented the actantial model. As a result, we have found that one person appears at the same time in the role of the three main actants in the narrative: subject, sender and receiver. Three roles by one person might be the reason why the object loses its value for principal actant.

Greimas, as the most famous theoretician of "narrative semantics", believes that the structure of a narrative, like the structure of a sentence, has its own grammar. By presenting some models such as action pattern, narrative program, semantic square, etc., he tries to structure the relationships between the meaningful signs of a texte, so that we can understand the internal structures of the meaning of the text by transitioning from the surface structure to the deep structure. The narrativity is the main organizing principle of any discourse. Narrative semiotics aims to search for deep, inherent and stable structures in discourses that can be formally manifested at the surface of texts. In this research, by referring to Greimas's narrative semiotics and his famous models, we intend to examine the narrativity in the novel "If Only It Were True" by Marc Levy. Unlike other literary criticism approaches that search for meaning outside the text, the semiotic approach searches for the mechanism of meaning formation in the text itself and in the deep layers of the text.

Background of study:

In the field of semiotics, narratology and semantics, many studies have been done by researchers in the form of books and articles. Emphasizing the narrative aspect of Greimas's approach, Abbasi has analyzed Persian texts in the books "Samad: The Structure of a Myth" and "Applied Narrative". Sha'iri has done many and extensive studies in this field, among which the books "Semantic of Literature: The Theory and Method of Analyzing Literary Discourse" and several articles such as "From Structuralist Semiotics to Discourse-Semiotics", "A Study of Types of Discourse Systems From the Semiotic Point of View", "Semiotic Analysis of the Process of Recognition in Literary Discourse: A Case Study of Pacheh Khizak written by Sadegh Choubak ".Marc Levy's works have also been the subject of researches with different approaches of literary criticism, among them, we can mention the article by Hassan Zokhtareh and Martine Boyer-Weinmann entitled "A Study of Literary Success in the Contemporary Media Age, Case Study: She and He by Marc Levy". The authors of this article examine the reasons for the success of best-selling novels and successful authors. Ali Abbassi and Mitra Moradi have studied the beginning and end parts of Levy's novel in the article entitled "The Study of the Incipit and the Closure in All Those Things We Never Said by Marc Levy".

In this research, using the models presented by Greimas, we intend to investigate the narrativity in the novel "If Only It Were True", by the French author, Marc Levy. By conducting this study, we are looking for an answer to the question "how the narrativity as the organizing principle of the discourse has helped to create meaning and reflect the author's desired values". Our hypothesis in this research is that the text consists of a set of semiotic-semantic elements at the surface and deep structures, between which there are meaningful relationships. Therefore, the purpose of this researche is to study the action pattern, narrative program and semantic square in this novel in order to determine how these elements make the discourse meaningful.

The findings of this study show that in this novel we are not facing a simple set of narrative programs, but there is a set of narrative programs that go in parallel to each other, this indicates the complexity of the narrative course of the action subject. By examining the semantic square, we learn that although the actors are temporarily in the position of death, they eventually come out of it and return to life; This reflects the author's positiviste values.