A Narratological Reading of Space in Akbar Radi’s Works: Selected Plays

In the series of narratological studies, Marie-Laure Ryan has presented a more comprehensive categorization. She described four categories of narrative space, the spatial extension of the text, the space that serves as container for the text and the spatial form of the text for the study of space in narrative. Applying Ryan’s terminology, the present paper has adopted a descriptive-analytical approach to study Ryan’s categorization of space in Radi’s plays. The study of spatial frames and their relations to setting and story space in the selected corpus of Radi’s works indicates a particular type of continuity between the spatial frame and the off-frame space in such a way that his spatial frame does not separate the stage from its surrounding world; quite the contrary, it frames a part of the narrative universe. The characters, objects, dialogues, voices, and visual signs constantly put the visible spatial frame in interaction or in contrast with invisible narrative world. The frame of the stage that often acts as a fence against its surrounding world breaks down by the end of the play to let the chaos of the narrative world penetrate into the stage frame.