Explaining the Structural-Narrative Distinctions between Story and Memoir-Story, Based on Some Works of Holy Defense Literature

Memoir is very close to story and sometimes it can be turned into a story by the least attention to the text of the memoir. The most obvious common feature of these two forms, apart from the story elements, is the presence of narration. "Narrative-ness of a narrative text is created under the influence of factors such as: plot coherence, development of the main action, atmosphere creation, characterization, etc.
Memoir-story is one of the emerging forms in the genre of resistance literature and due to the presence of many cause and effect developments, it is closer to the story than the memoir and has many elements of the story other than imagination. In this research, it is intended to examine the aspects of narrative and structure in the two forms of story and memoir-story, and explain their commonalities and differences.

The current research is carried on through a descriptive-analytical method and has used library resources. Based on the question of the border between story and memoir-story, the author first collected the theoretical sources of the research and then verified his claims by analyzing the textual examples.

The problem of the present research is based on the issue that although memoir-story is based on memory, elements such as suspense, multiple episodes, characterization, and landscape have made it very close to the story. Also, the study of the narrative infrastructures of memoir and story shows that these two forms, in addition to sharing elements, have another aspect in common, and that is the structure of the narrative action based on a formulated description of past events: "today-here", narrating "that day-there". Based on scientific evidence, the author proves that there are many narrative differences between the two forms of story and memoir-story. In fact, the purpose of the current research is to explain the distinctions and define the border between the two forms of story and memoir-story by relying on several works of fiction and memoir-story in the literature of Holy Defense, and the author tries to explain categories such as narrative action, narrative levels, place and type, narrator, and narrative distance in these two types. From the results of the research, it appears that there is a difference between the two forms of story and memoir-story in terms of narrative action, narrative distance, narrator's qualities and narrative levels.

The first achievement of the current study is that the narrative action in the story consists of four simple-to-advanced narrative models and has three levels: the outside world, the world of the literary work, and the world of the story, with each of these levels including a range of characters, elements and categories. Here in the story, one faces intertwinements that organize the vast narrative network; in the memoir-story, however, one faces the simplest action of a first-class narrative, because the author and the narrator are the same person, and he is reporting to what he has experienced in the past. Another achievement of the current study is that the narrator in the story is different from the memoir-story in terms of type and position. The narrator in the story is not the author; he/she is created by the mind of the author of the story, and is different from the author in terms of sex and class; in the memoir-story, the narrator is the same author who narrates the narrative of that day-there. There are many narrators in the story, but in the memoir-story, the narrator is only a monologist. Another achievement of the current research is that the co-narrator and the memoir-story have a narrative distance, i.e., there is a time gap between the time of the incident and the time of its narration; this distance; however, is variable in story from being close to far infinite. Since the reality and the identity of the narrator is the same as the author in the memoir-story, he lives as long as the author lives.