The Functions of Description in the Narration with the Emphasis on the Jami’s Yusuf and Zulaikha

Description is a kind of tool for highlighting in the literary text and stimulating the emotions of audience. From the onset of Persian poetry until now, poets have used this important element in all poetic forms and narrative poems. Narration is a way of presenting events or occurrences, and it has been examined in the narrative analysis of factors involved in narration, that is, the time and components of narration. This paper analyzed the functions of description in the narration, in the Yusuf and Zulaikha poem of Jami. For this purpose, descriptions that are used in this poem are determined first, and then during the next stage, the function of these descriptions in Yusuf and Zulaikha poem of Jami are considered and analyzed with the emphasis on the Tomaszewski and Genette’s approach. Jami’s Yusuf and Zulaikha poem is a narrative text in which two main structures of narrative and descriptiveness are recognizable. The narrative consists of two dimensions, the time of story and the time of speech, but the description is only consists of speech dimension. Descriptions that had been used in this poem are placed in the free and static categories and from this point, the function of description with respect to the narrative text dimension is to create a negative momentum in narrative. On the other hand, every narration has its own components. It is a tool for developing and highlighting these components, and from this perspective, it has the function of characterization and spatialization.