Analysis of narative time in Nezamis` Leili and Majnoon based on Janets` theory

Time narration is one of the basic issues in narratology. The main theorist of this issue, the French structuralist ,is Gerard Janet. For him, time plays an important role in narration progress. Janet has studied and analyzed time in narration, around three axes of order, duration and frequency. Each of the three factors defined in these axes, creates one of the three speed states in narration: constant speed, positive and negative speed. “Leili and Majnoon” story by Hakim Nizami Ganjavi has been versed in the sixth century. The study of this story based on Janet’s narration and time theory indicates that negative speed has the most important role among the mentioned states and Nizami has tended to redundancy and reducing the narration speed more than brevity and positive speed in narrating this story.