Investigating the Structure of Two Stories of Marzbān-nāma and Haft Peykar Using Greimas’ Actantial Model

Structural analysis is one of the methods for analyzing literary texts. A branch of interest to structuralists is narratology. Greimas, the Lithuanian semiotician, explains the structure of the narrative and the characters of the story using the dual contrasts and the actantial model. The aim of the current study is to investigate the structures of a story from Marzbān-nāma entitled “Irajasteh and Khosrow” and another story from Haft Peykar entitled “Fitnah and Bahram” using a structuralist approach. The characters and actors in the stories and the similarities and differences of the two stories and the type of actions are evaluated. The result shows that while the two stories have a common deep structure, they are not homogeneous in terms of their surface structure. The subject actor in the story of “Irajasteh and Khosrow” plays an important role in the plot of the story, while in the story of “Fitnah and Bahram” as an active actor, encourages the subject or the hero to act.