Signs of Emotional Action of Fear in the Stories of Bijan Najdi with Special Focus on the Selected Stories of the Leopards Who Have Run with Me, Unfinished Stories, and Once Again the Same Streets

Emotional action is a non-verbal action that expresses the narrator’s emotions and emotional behavior. This research examines the signs of fear in three volumes of selected stories of Bijan Najdi using a descriptive-analytical method. Its objective is to read the text to uncover the explicit and implicit meanings of “the feeling of fear” exhibited by narrative characters through the use of verbal elements in those stories. These elements range from the smallest ones to the largest ones, such as “sound, word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and ultimately the text itself”. The signs of fear exhibited by the narrative characters in Najdi’s stories can be studied from three perspectives: narrative, language, and imagery. From the narrative perspective, the main sources of Najdi’s narrative structure are character, setting, and point of view. From the linguistic perspective, the grammatical structure of sentences, the structure of action verbs, and sounds are the expressive devices to convey the feeling of fear. From the imagery perspective, simile is one of the expressive devices used to achieve this goal. Among the various types of fear, logical and abnormal fears have the most prevalent, and they are presented differently in connection with each character. Sex, age, and social class of the characters are determining factors in the frequency of different types of fear. The research findings indicate that the story’s general atmosphere corresponds with the type of language used in the text, and linguistic mechanisms work towards inducing the intended meaning.