A Look at Narrative Devices of Embedded Tale in One Thousand and One Nights

Most of the tales in various manuscripts, translations and editions of The Thousand and One Nights are valuable ploys of literary tradition in the East. The book includes many frame tales with an attractive complex structure and many embedded tales which hinge contextually on them. To truly understand the work, we should know all multicultural aspects and changes it has experienced in transmission process. Thus, simultaneous analysis of both textual and intertextual devices is necessary because it reveals the function of embedded tales and leads to the recognition of the links of international tradition web. This paper looks at three of embedded tales in The Thousand and One Nights and their narrative devices to illustrate how discussed narrative motifs are adopted with different ends to preserve the continuous international tradition of storytelling. Consequently, we encounter many various tales which are basically the same.