The Structure of Time in Bozorg Alavi's Her Eyes: A Cognitive Semantics Perspective

How do we experience elusive, intangible and concealed time in narrative fiction? This article examines the conceptualization of time in language. Redefining narrative from a cognitive perspective and explicating the function of time in fictional narratives, it studies the mechanism of time in Bozorg Alavi’s Her Eyes. Among the different aspects of time in narrative, this article considers the structure of time in relation to the events of the narrative and the way they connect with each other in a temporal chain. These two issues are discussed by having recourse to “Mental Spaces” and “Conceptual Integration” theories. Applying these two cognitive semantic theories to fictional narrative suggests that narrative spaces are structured by three elements including point of view, focus, and event. Based on their internal parts, each of these spaces, then, blends into another space and the string of events is thus built. Consequently, this article explains the construction and emergence of meaning at the level of discourse.