Ambiguities in “Seven Captains” the short story collection

Document Type : Rhetoric

Author

Assistant professor of Persian language and literature, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran.

10.22091/jls.2025.12075.1658

Abstract

Seven Captains (2020) is a name of short story collection authored by Shahriar Mandanipour, which confronts the reader with many ambiguities. The subject of this article is the reason for the ambiguities and an attempt to unravel them. The inherent compactness and succinctness of the short story genre contribute to a sense of ambiguity and open-ended interpretation, which relies heavily on the engagement of the reader. This ambiguity aligns the short story more closely with poetry, as both forms often utilize indirect references, implicit meanings, and various forms of compression that relate to narrative elements such as plot, resolution, characterization, and events, thereby enhancing the rhetorical quality of the story through the creation of suspense. Furthermore, ambiguity is a hallmark of postmodernism, intertwining with themes of uncertainty, discontinuity, and absence. This analysis employs a descriptive-analytical approach to explore the stories within this collection, focusing on the techniques that foster ambiguity. The findings indicate that various elements contribute to the ambiguity present in these narratives, including the elimination of plot chains at different narrative stages, metaphorical plots and episodes that obscure causal relationships, the blending of multiple realities with mythological elements, fragmented dialogues among soldiers presented in a collage format that necessitates careful decoding by the reader, the use of pronouns lacking clear references that shroud characters in uncertainty, the intertwining of textual and intertextuality connotations, the disruption of linear narrative, and the use of symbol.

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References

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Rhetoric and Grammar Studies
Volume 14, Issue 26
March 2025
Pages 135-151

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