Transforming Memories into Stories in the Holy Defense Literature: A Review of Atash be Ekhtiar (Fire at Will) Novel

Diary is a literary genre including the memories of the scenes or events of the writer’s life experiences where he/she has been present and has played a role or has just witnessed them. Given the fact that memories depend on writers’ mind, and they encounter events from their own perspective and, over time, they are accumulated in their minds, the writers recreate them while writing, relying on their writing skills and artistic talent. Employing these variables, the writers transform their memories from simple anecdotes of historical events into a pleasing and everlasting literary work. With the outbreak of Saddam's eight-year war against Iran, many Iranian combatants began writing diaries and notes. While expressing the feelings and thoughts of the combatants, these memoirs and notes were regarded as historical documents of the vast dimensions and greatness of the imposed war, to be applied to explain the realities of the war and also to create stories. Decoding the process of memory-to-story transformation in resistance literature contains the issue by which researches, while formulating and defining the principles and rules of memory-to-story transformation, can pave the way for more writers to create such works. Hence, this research is aimed at analyzing the metamorphosis of memory into a novel focusing on the novel "Atash be Ekhtiar" (Fire at Will) written by Mohammad Reza Bayrami. The results showed that this novel contains features such as dialogue, staging, movement in time, fluent flow of the mind, etc. which has turned this work of memory into a literary text and has given it a literary-fictional nature.