Metafiction in Mohammad Charmshir's Dastan-e door va deraz-e safar-e sultan & be diyar-e farang

This paper studies the concept of metafiction in Charmshir’s play Dastan-e door vaderaz-e safar-e sultan … be diyar-e farang (1998). Metafiction, as a result of an analytical perspective emerged first in modern novels, attempts to challenge the conventional frame of fictional reference to the reality of the external world as it is suggested in literary Realism. In this type of stories, narrative elements such as plot, character, time, and place are no longer representatives of imagined reality, but they in fact reflect a perpetual conflict between art and reality. However, it can be suggested that reality here is subordinated by the referents of the external world. Linguistically, metalanguage and poetic functions of drama would dominate its object language. The story then will be directed toward its narrative elements as well as its own process of creation. Adaptation and meta-historiographyare some of the other features of this style of writing stories which is associated with parody and irony. Charmshir’s play is not really a narrative of the king’s long journey to Europe;rather it is a challenge for the playwright to realize a metafictional probability in form of a postmodern drama. This play is an artwork about the process of building an alternative story and is a new exploration on narrative facts.The elements such as characters, structure, plot, the authority of the narrator, and the style of narrative are no longer the hidden parts of drama in the representation of the story and meaning;in fact, they are the story in itself. The foregrounding of language here is an ironic reference to literary and dramatic texts while it is a fictional device for fabricating history and manipulating data by which the reader expects to receive narrative information. This studyunravels new aspects of narrative structure in Iraniandrama using an analytic-descriptive approach.