A Thematic Criticism of " Setting" in Golshiri's Shazde Ehtejab

An attempt to discover the origin of the author’s perceptions and imaginations and their major orientations, is among the achievements of Thematic Criticism. Georges Poulet, the Belgian critic, tries to describe the setting of the stories through searching for the images, forms, movements and other elements involved in the their verbal and pictorial networks. This article adopts the same method to explain the setting of Shāzde Ehtejāb, by Golshiri. The narrator of the story, through associating the past, understands each character and event out of their general context and thus does not come to a coherent whole. Each of these isolated images is, in fact, a degenerated representation of the past in the narrator’s mind.