The Interaction between the Myth and Metaphor in Short Stories by Shahriar Mandanipour

Combining myth and story in modernist and post-modernist narration is among the techniques that make the narration to incline towards metaphors and being multi-layer. This way, in order to understand the story better, the reader is left with no choice but to find the mythical deep structure of the story hidden in the underlying layers of the text and put together the narration parts based on the said structure. In this paper, using Jacobson’s theory about the metaphor and metonymy as the poles of the language, the mythical deep structure of several short stories by Shahriar Mandanipour are analyzed and explained. It is shown that in these stories, a mythical character is sometimes the substitute for a fictional one, and sometimes the mythical time replaces the fictional one. This means that the past in a character’s mind in the story takes place in a qualitative time, and the time passes between the past, the present and the future, while the author replaces the times constantly. In some cases, one story replaces a mythical fiction in general, and in some other cases, a mythical narration substitutes the story’s general narration. In the present study, Mandanipour’s stories are analyzed at five levels of description and creation of character, dealing with time, description of the setting, the plot and the narration at macrolevel based on the structural features of a mythical narration. It is revealed that most of the replacements have taken place at the level of language.