An Interdisciplinary Study of Narrative Structure in Dash Akol as a Short Story and Dash Akol as a Movie

• Main Authors: Dashti Azam, Hadidi Yaser
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Petra Christian University 2015-01-01
• Series: K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature
• Subjects: Adaptation; characterization; Dash Akol; focalization; Hedayat; Kimiai; narrative technique
• Online Access: http://kata.petra.ac.id/index.php/ing/article/view/18933
• ISSN: 1411-2639; 2302-6294

This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie adapted from it. “Dash Akol” is a short story written by a famous Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat in 1932. Hedayat’s “Dash Akol” was made into a movie in 1971 by Masoud Kimiai. There are some discrepancies between the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie, triggering a number of significant implications. This article discusses these discrepancies along with Hedayat’s and Kimiai’s narrative techniques. To this end, it applies Genett’s (1988) Narrative Discourse and his three main narrative methods: narrating, characterization, and focalization. Meanwhile, it brings in Rimmon-Kenen’s (2002) strategy to study characters, and Stam and Burgoyne and Flitterman-lewis (2005) to show the ways in which the movie has deviated from the story. In terms of characterization, it studies traits such as, action, speech, naming and setting.