Image Schemas of Happiness in Three Fictions (Persian, English and Arabic)

The present article has tried to study the conceptual metaphors of three stories from three languages which are written in the style of Stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device, to show how the mental functions establish relative similarities in the image schemas among these three languages, and also how these cultures create different image schemas. In this research, the extracting data from the corpus has been done by searching the keywords related to the domain of "happiness" and according to the relevant linguistic context. The description and analysis of metaphors have been done in a comparative way to examine the fields of source and existing mappings and at last the related image schemas. The data of this research shows that Sadegh Choobak (Sange Sabour in Persian) has used five image schemas, "Motion, Force, Existence, Volume and Space", William Faulkner (Sound and Fury in English) has used four image schemas, "Existence, Volume, Force and Movement", and Najib Mahfouz (Miramar in Arabic) has been used three image schemas, "Existence, Volume and Force" to express the feeling of " happiness ". The existing similarities show the universality of image schemas and differences indicate the culture-specific nature of image schemas.