A study of time duration in narrating of magicians’ story in Qur’an (based on Gerard Genette’s perspective)

As one of the most significant elements of narrative structure, time relationships bring the audience closer to the atmosphere and world of the story. The issue of duration is the most discussed realm of time in the narrative which takes into account the relationship between the period of events’ occurrence in a story as well as the amount of the text devoted to the same events’ presentation. Indeed, finding the duration of time within the text and its investigation in different versions of a story leads to a better understanding of the given text. It also lets the audience be in close contact with the scene of that event and proceed along with its different acceleration. This paper tends to study the duration of time in four versions of magicians’ story and their confrontation with prophet Moses (AS) and Pharaoh in the Qur’an in the light of Gerard Genette’s perspective. Consequently, the examination of narrative techniques related to the time duration in these versions represented that the scene and dialogue, and the descriptive pause have obtained the highest frequency, and as a result, it provides a condition to take a lesson from the story, while the elimination and summarization have attained the least frequency.