An Investigation of the Pace of the Story Time in the Narrative of “Cloudy Years” Novel by Ali-Ashraf Darvishian

Abstract

“Cloudy Years” novel by Ali-Ashraf Darvishian written in 4 volumes and 1622 pages and its events contain about 33 years of hero-narrator’s life. In the article, the speed of passing the story events through the author’s narrative is measured on the basis of Gerard Genette’s opinions. Genette utilizes order, duration, and frequency categories to measure the tempo of a novel. The study and survey of the existent specimens in all the novel demonstrate that the order of the events of the novel is more lineal, even though analepses and prolepses would be seen in the narrative, and evaluating the duration of the story and narrative makes clear that the average of 7/42 days of story exhibited in every page of the novel. The comparison between the average duration of every volume of the novel with the average duration of the novel proves negative, positive, positive and negative fluctuations in every volume of the novel, in turn. The acquired statistics of how being repeated the events of story approve also the more number of singulative frequencies which has a significant relationship with more lineal passing the narrative. The findings and conclusion of this research present new points in its theoretical framework.

Keywords

• narratology
• gerard genette
• story time
• ali-ashraf darvishian
• cloudy years