The Analysis of Creation Methods for Setting in the Story of "Khorshidshah Falling in Love" from Samak Ayyar

In written narrative, from the perspective of today’s narratology and the reader-oriented critical view, imaginative and personal creation of setting in the mind of the reader is an important phenomenon. Our research examines these creations in the story of falling in love of KhorshidShah - the protagonist of the long folktale Samak Ayyar- and sketches a precise and part by part development of the narrative world drawn from the locations made possible in such settings. This article depicts that the narrator of Samak Ayyar, in some cases describes the setting briefly for the reader; sometimes uses the condensation and saturation of the described setting to achieve focalization and adds to its visual effects by describing the details in order to induce a setting in the mind; and other times leaves the existence of such locations to the imagination and deduction of the reader to reconstructs those settings of the narrative world, based on the symmetries available in the text; and in some settings utilizes both techniques in parallel, in order to introduce more locations. In this ancient substory, deductive creation of setting is one of the important elements which is used to develop and complete the other settings that the narrator has been obligated to describe them in the text; Also, we saw that by benefiting from the mixture of different types of setting creation, and the development of the map of the narrative world in intervals, it is possible to demonstrate much clearer and completer aspects of the space of long folktales in front the reader.
Introduction
Important components are necessary in the formation of a narrative, and by focus and concentration on each component, it is possible to better comprehend its known and unknown layers and capacities; one of these layers is methods of creation of setting, which was neglected for long in the early days of narratology, yet later gradually found its prominent position amongst the scholars. In this research, considering the significance of the uniqueness of the narrative of Samak Ayyar in the narrative literature of Iran, the effort is made to analyze and examine closely the methods of creation of setting in the beginning section of this narrative (the story of the birth of Khorshidshah until his falling in love). Many articles have examined this folktale treasure that possibly dates back to the Parthian era, one research by Hesampour refers to the particular attractions it creates through location description of the cities and introduces that such capacities exist, yet there is no background research performed on the methods of the creation of settings. The rest of the background in Iranian articles deal with the element of setting and narrative space on the theoretical part, and are not related the actual text of Samak Ayyar. This article has a mandate to put the text itself into consideration and carefully dodges any interpretations or speculations none existing in the text in order to achieve an unbiased and loyal analysis based solely on the text. The goal of this research is to answer main question such as:
- What are the techniques used to create a setting in this narrative extract?
- Is it possible to plot the map of the narrative world in order to better demonstrate the relative correlation of the settings in an incremental fashion and what sort of facilitations does such a map provide to the mind of the audience of this ancient text?
Therefore, This review also suggests the technique of creation of an incremental map of the narrative world resulted from the amalgamation of the settings of the narrative as they develop, and argues that such maps could prove to be invaluable when it comes to comprehension of a long array of settings and locations that one often encounters in the long folktales.
Method
The original narrative of Samak Ayyar from 6^th century Hijri Qamari and corrected by Khanlari is analyzed using the library method and exact note extraction. We divide the sub-narrative of falling in love into three episodes of birth, childhood, and love, in order to achieve a more tangible comprehension of setting development of the narrative world as it occurs step-by-step. The new methods and theories related to the modern novel which concern themselves with the “whys”, such as relations of psychological or phenomenological analysis of the setting, are disregarded by the article and instead, the focus is put on the “hows”, such as the techniques the text itself incorporates to achieve the creation of settings, namely through inductive and deductive methods. Furthermore, the concept of narrative chronotopes is discussed throughout the induced settings where a high volume of setting description is used in a very concentrated amount of text. The assessment is word by word, in order to be able to extract elements related to setting based on the theoretical tools incorporated by the article. In order to create a better visual access to an integrated image of the narrative world, these extracted settings are put into tables and then each data helps create a separate map of the world for each of the three sub-narratives incrementally. The data are then used to create tables of percentages to be utilized in the final conclusion.
Conclusion
The narrator often briefly describes the setting to the reader, sometimes uses the condensation and saturation of the described setting to achieve focalization and adds to its visual effects by describing the details in order to induce a setting in the mind; and other times leaves the existence of such locations to the imagination and deduction of the reader to reconstructs those settings of the narrative world, based on the symmetries available in the text; and in some settings utilizes both techniques in parallel, in order to introduce more locations. We conclude that deductive creation of setting is one of the important elements which are used to develop and complete the other settings that the narrator has been obligated to describe them in the text; the chronotopes are used to create focalizations on the parts of plot intended by the narrator, such as on the hill top of the ghastly dessert or inside the tent of the muse. The episodes of birth and childhood are relatively without focalization but the narrator condenses the settings in the episode of falling in love and carefully describes little details of the constituent objects, a technique which is almost extraordinary for such ancient texts.  Also, we saw that by benefiting from the mixture of different types of setting creation, and the development of the map of the narrative world in intervals, it is possible to demonstrate much clearer and completer aspects of the space of long folktales, since such mapping creates a more organized temporal comprehension of the new locations being added visually. These induced and deduced locations on the map also help imagine a more integrated narrative space without which the reader would have to rely on sheer memory in a very vast narrative world of the long tale.