A Study of the Narrative Techniques in Shāzde Ehtejāb

Modern story-telling is no longer interested in the traditional ways of narrating and the content of the story is no more as significant as the narrative devices. The novelette Shāzde Ehtejāb by Hooshang Golshiri, is one of the early examples in Persian fiction in which a great emphasis is laid on "form" and "techniques" of narrating the story. A significant point in this work is the technical turn in point of view which has some crucial effects on the function of the other fictional elements. In Shāzde Ehtejāb, Golshiri has made use of both indirect and direct interior monologue. Our study tries to demonstrate that this work of fiction is so coherent and structured that all its elements do exactly the functions they are supposed to. Although benefiting the technique of the stream of consciousness, the work does not suffer from the confusion prevailing among the novels written by this technique.