A Comparative Study of Narrative Structure in The Book of Job from The Old Testament and “The Tale of Job’s Misery” from Stories of the Quran by Atiq Nishaburi (Surabadi) Using Algirdas Greimas’s Model

The story of Job the prophet is one of the narratives included in both The Quran and The Old Testament but narrated differently in each of them. Despite similarities in form and content, the narrative in The Old Testament and the narratives by interpreters of The Quran differ in terms of plot structure. Adopting Algirdas Greimas’s narratological model as well as his semiotics of discourse and using descriptive-analytical method, the present study conducts a comparative analysis of narrative structure in The Book of Job from The Old Testament and one of the Islamic narratives of the same story, namely “The Tale of Job’s Misery” from the ancient Persian text Stories of the Quran by Aboubakr Atiq Nishaburi (Surabadi). To this aim, first, the actantial model, narrative chains, and plot structure are concisely explained according to Greimas’s theory; then, the events, characters, and narrative structure are analyzed and compared in the two selected narratives of Job’s story. Finally, this study concludes that the plot of The Book of Job is contractual, whereas that of “The Tale of Job’s Misery” is performative. Moreover, in both texts, Yahweh/God is the sender, but the most striking difference is the devil/Satan, who is not an actant in The Book of Job, while he is the opponent and the performing subject in the Islamic narrative. Besides, in these two narratives, the function of the disrupter of the pattern is attributed to different characters. The analysis of the process of semiosis, the evolution of narrative structure, and the role of modal verbs shows that in the Islamic narrative the active-tensive system and in The Book of Job the existential-tensive system form the dominant discourse in the creation of meaning.