The Role of Instructive Functions in Identifying the Structure of Rumi’s Narratives (Case Study: The Story of the Dignified Dervish)

Many of the stories of Masnavi, both in terms of narration and the elements depend on other narratives created or combined before Rumi.  One of the important factors of this type of dependency is the connection that each text makes with others on the basis of contextual relationship. Accordingly, the role of the author in the position of instructor and educator can also cause dependence with other cultural and literal contexts. The author, thus, alleviates the anxiety of others’ influence and, relying on teaching specific aspects of earlier narratives, engages in creative misreading. Through a descriptive-analytical method, this research makes an attempt to find out how educational functions have led to the construction of a new narratives derived from the original stories. It also tries to explain the techniques employed by Rumi. The results indicated that trying to attest his instructive ideas, Rumi has intervened creatively by combining the previous stories and converting them into his own style, adding secondary educational themes to the main themes of two related stories in the form of monologues, placing the poet, through the role of a teacher, in the frame of story characters to present specific attitudes, changing the perspective, and prolonging the discourses to express educational subjects to transform previous structures and construct his own narratives.