The Structural Study of the Tale of Nakhjiran-va-Shir (The Lion and the Beasts)

The tale of Nakhjīrān va shīr is one of the long and complicated stories of Masnavi which has a bilateral structure. This symbolic story has a surface structure and deep structure which demand structural patterns to be analyzed. Therefore, the surface structure of the story which is the very short tale of “Kalila and Damna” has been studied due to Propp’s method concluding to this fact that the story is folk which is comparable to that of Propp’s fairytales will be studied. Whereas this story is beyond a simple surface structure, there is some complications so much that Propp’s method is not able to be provided in it, therefore the deep structure of Tzvetan Todorov and Greimas are necessary. The analysis of this story due to two forementioned patterns cause to compare the structure of two different works, the features and other capacity of the story.