Abstract:

The utilisation of the narrative technique that is called multi-levelled narrative, or in other words, frame story or story within a story, is a tradition that has frequently been observed in both oral lore and written literature all through its course from the beginnings to the contemporary literature of today. We can mention A Thousand and One Nights in Eastern literature and Decameron in Western literature as two of its well-known examples. In postmodern literature, it is a technique used to achieve fragmentation of the text. Another term closely connected to multi-levelled narrative is metalepsis, which means the crossing of the boundaries between narrative levels. Metalepsis, which has been reinterpreted by the postmodernist approach, has become deepened and more functional with respect to the formulation of the text. İhsan Oktay Anar is a remarkable contemporary Turkish writer in postmodern literature. In his novel entitled Efrâsiyâb’ın Hikâyeleri (The Stories of Efrâsiyâb), multi-levelled narrative and metalepsis are both of crucial importance regarding the structure and the plot of the text. In this paper, theoretic approaches to the aforementioned two terms will be shortly introduced and an attempt will be made to analyse the novel Efrâsiyâb’ın Hikâyeleri according to the theoretic framework thus obtained. Another objective of this paper is to demonstrate the functions regarding the structure of the text fulfilled by the phenomena of multi-levelled narrative and metalepsis, which have gained new meaning thanks to the postmodernist approach, making use of examples taken from the novel.