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Shazdeh Ihtejab by Houshang Golshiri is one of the most valuable examples of Iran’s fictional literature in terms of its use of narrative techniques and devices. Golshiri in Shazdeh Ihtejab has benefitted from various narrative elements; however, it can be argued that the complexity of the narrative techniques of the work is to a great extent due to his use of two elements of “the voice of narrator” and “focalization.” Selecting the limited third person narrator which is restricted to the minds of two main characters of the work (Shazdeh Ihtejab and Fakhri) and offering the thoughts and sayings of these two characters in direct and indirect discourse has caused the voice of the narrator or narrators to be mixed with the perspective of the focalizer or focalizers and has rendered understanding the relation between narrator and focalizer and the difference between the two difficult. Based on this, in the present article, the two elements of “voice of the narrator” and “focalization” in the narrative text of Shazdeh Ihtejab are discussed in order to present the artistic use of the two elements in the narrative text of Shazdeh Ihtejab.

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So far, many thinkers with different approaches have studied the concept of “the other” and its examples in various aspects of human life. Literature has also attracted the attention of researchers and interested scholars as a platform for representing examples of “the other”. In addition to recognizing the place of “otherness” in the worldview of individuals in different eras, studying examples of “the other” in the literary texts has also made it possible to delimit the realm of “I”. In this paper, using an analytical method and adopting an eclectic approach, the researchers studied the potentials of Rumi’s Mathnavi in ​​representing the types of “the other” and in realizing the levels of otherness of “the other” and its place in the mystical worldview so as to gain a relative knowledge of the structures that govern mystical thoughts. To that end, we first explained the concept of “the other” in three intellectual-philosophical systems, namely contrastive, dialectical and intersubjective, and mentioned examples of “the other” in verses of Mathnavi. Then, we presented a reading of the levels of realization of otherness of “the other” and the conditions of their possibility in this text. From a general point of view, due to the contrastive structure of the mystical worldview and the definition of “the other” as an “alien”, the realization of high levels of otherness in the text of Mathnavi cannot be expected, but the narrative of the experience of union and depicting the inability of “I” to understand “the infinite other” can be regarded as representation of the highest level of otherness. Meanwhile, in the distance from the “alien” to “the infinite other” and through dialogue, a level of otherness is also represented in the relationship between the characters in some stories of Mathnavi.