The status, purpose and style of the story telling (exemplum) in Shahnameh of Ferdowsi

Most poets and writers in Iranian culture have used a lot of "exemplum" as a rhetorical element, because exemplum regardless that to be based on a famous story or habit or to be simply a wise, well-meaning and well-worded sentence has great persuasive power. Hakim Abolqasem Ferdowsi, like other poets, expresses the exemplum inShahnameh in various occasions by awareness of a persuasive power that lies in a variety of exemplums, and he interprets it as "storytelling". In this paper, the quality of these "storytelling" has been examined through descriptive-analytical method. To do this, we first have introduced different meanings of the word "storytelling" in Shahnameh, and then, based on the couplets that this word has been used in them in the meaning of the expression of the exemplum, we have tried to show that Ferdowsi often uses of this persuasive strategy at the time of hidden or obvious inconsistency or dissonance of events of the story, or the speech, or the act, or the verdict of the characters with the vote of the exemplum and rhetorical speaker, and in most cases, the appearance of the exemplum is for this reason that a word, an event, an adventure, a decision, a condition or an opinion, a belief and the behavior way that is not acceptable to be changed, and its speaker identifies that if he sees fit, to be expressed in the form of an exemplum which is the result of collective wisdom of predecessors, will have a greater impact.
Ferdowsi also pursues various purposes such as punishment, annulment, reverence; strengthen the spirit, and weakening the spirit of narrating these exemplums.
Although the most of storytelling in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is accompanied by the announcement of the speaker, and he states, aside from the exemplum, there are examples in which they narrating the exemplum is done without news. There are other examples that the wise word is quoted from the wise human and is the basis for decision making and practice. This wise word is in fact the same exemplum, and in terms of content and status of appearance, has no difference with the words that have been referred to as their being sample, and the only difference is that there is no mention of the phrase "storytelling" .
The present paper, these mentioned results have been obtained by examining the story telling technique in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh; the results that have no history in the field of rhetorical researches of Shahnameh, and can be effective in identifying the art of this famous poet and the his poetry style.