Derealization: Actualization of Delusion, Anti-mimetic Narration in Peikare Farhad

This article scrutinizes anti-mimetic or unnatural features in Peikare Farhad’s narrationtaking advantage of Brian Richardson and Jan Alber’s theories of unnatural narratology. They broach the fact that in unnatural narration, the narrator, the chronology, space, and events are far from the usual expectations and are replete with unfamiliarized and impossible or unnatural qualities. In Abbas Marufi’s Peikare Farhad, the painted woman on the pen case, derived from Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, is given a voice and becomes the narrator as an alternative to The Blind Owl’s narrator who is himself the painter of the painted woman. In Peikare Farhad, however, the boundaries between reality and hallucination are violated. It seems that the inner world of the mind is more real than the real world to the extent that distinguishing reality from fantasy becomes an impossibility; subsequently, it results in hyper-reality. Furthermore, along with the reincarnation, disruption of chronology and frequent jumps of spaces, the narration goes on. The omniscient narrator of the novel is not a real human being, but a woman who arises from a canvas and a pen case. It should be illuminated that the abstruse and anomalous events originate from the inside of the painter’s mind and she is just given the role of the narrator. Pertaining to the type of narrator, hyper-real events or the conflation of chimerical and actual experiences, the disruption of time and space chronology, and reincarnation which validate a break from mimetic narration in the novel and transgression of conventions, it is grasped that the novel follows anti-mimetic narrative theories.