A Study on Musical Aspects of Polyphonic Narratives in Iranian Novels and Plays) Case studies: The Last Play of the Lady by Belqeis Soleimani and Afra by Bahram Beizai)

The present paper attempts to compare the role of narrative canons in the development of story and drama focusing on some prevalent theoretical patterns in organizing the voices and composing the opus. The polyphonic narrative points to a literary or dramatic text in which a few different discoursal threads explain and display an event simultaneously. In this kind of literary narrative, the narrator plays two or more roles and applies various narrative levels to organize and develop the event. Therefore, the narrator’s voice seldom appears in a dominant position over other characters’ voice in the literary or dramatic world but it is perfectly along with other voices. Assuming that one may find some creative aspects of the narrator as an organizer of various narrative levels in the Iranian contemporary literature, the present research offers an analytical comparison of the polyphonic aspects in The Last Play of the Lady (2009), a novel by Belqeis Soleimani, and Afra or Day Passes (2006), a play by Bahram Beizai. In this regard, we have referred to the most crucial tenets of Mikhail Bakhtin concerning the polyphonic literature and considered the special position of novel amongst various modern literary genres. The qualitative evaluation of the polyphonic items confirms the realization of polyphonic experience in the two samples based on the existence of numerous group voices, monopoly rupture in narrator role as a cast, flexible and fluid strains of the literary or dramatic narration and the way of voice distribution among the two works.