Echo-narcissistic patterns in characterization of children''''s stories

The Greek myth of Narcissus is a narrative of Echo''s one-sided love for Narcissus. Echo has been a talkative, sweet-spoken girl who after Hera''s curse, has lost the power of speech, and can only repeat one the last word of another. Narcissus is a boy who ignores the love of others and is immersed in his own beauty. In other words, one side of this discourse forms a narcissistic personality, whose self-centered perspective deprives him of seeing and paying attention to the other; On the other side of the discourse, is a character who has no verbal ability to convey his thoughts and emotions. Hence, it is not possible to have a dialogue between the parties to this discourse. This study seeks to show that the bipolarity of echo-narcissism is one of the motifs of the child''s fictional literature, represented in the child-father dual confrontation costume (the father is not necessarily the male parent; rather, a metaphor for each is patriarchal). In this regard, this research seeks to respond in a descriptive-analytical way to how the basis of echo-narcissism is represented in the narrative structures of children''s stories. The novelty of the present study is that, first, it compares the network of relationships between all the main characters within a myth with the network of relationships between all the main characters within a children''s story; Second, for the first time in Iran, it examines narcissism and echoism in the context of fiction.