The Analysis of Sam’ak A’ayar’s Tale Based on Vladimir Propp’s Theory

As narratology has been known as a field of scientific study since a few decades ago, the narratologists have made an attempt to define specific narrative patterns. As a result they can analyze and interpret all the narrative structures through these patterns in both the old stories and the new modern novels. Many attempts took place in this field, but Vladimir Propp was ahead of others in his own time, and so his theory provided and caused a huge evolution in the science and field of narratology despite all its shortcomings and deficiencies. Propp focuses on the description of stories on the basis of their constructive elements and their mutual relations in his book entitled as “The Morphology of Fairy Tales”. After analyzing about 100 Russian stories, he obtained 31 conclusions. He believes that even the folk tales and the romances can be analyzed and interpreted within the framework of this pattern.The Tales of Sam’ak A’ayar are long Persian folkloric stories composed in the pre-Islamic era and finally developed in the sixth century.This paper intends to reveal Propp’s pattern, considering the Tale of Sa’mak A’ayar and then it compares the outcomes with Propp’s analysis and interpretation. In other words the present paper intends to study the Tale of Sa’mak A’ayar through a morphological approach. Although Propp’s theory is about the fairytales, still it enjoys a high potential for the Iranian stories; including the story of Sa’mak A’ayar. Many of the functions and the pragmatic studies made on the Tale of Sa’mak A’ayar are quite similar to Propp’s theory on morphology.