『꾸란』유수프 이야기의 서사 구조

Narrative Structure of the Story of Yusuf in the Qur'an

The paper aims to define the features of narratives in the Qur’an, especially the story of Yusuf. The Qur’an is a religious text in the first place, but it is widely known to have linguistic and literary merits. So is the story of Yusuf. The story, as a narrative work, has literary values through distinctive language, structure, characters and narrative strategies. The paper begins with an introduction to the literary aspects of the Qur’an, and the historical background of the twelfth Surah, the Surah of Yusuf. The paper looks into the story of Yusuf from three formal aspects: narrator, temporal structure, and characterization. It is clear that the narrator showed various attitudes towards the story: simple mediation between the characters’ dialogue and the narrate, or narrating in third person limited point of view, or in third person omniscient point of view, or in first person omniscient point of view which implies that God / narrator is speaking. It should be noted that the greater part of the story was not narrated by the narrator himself, but by the characters. As for the temporal structure, the overall events of the story progressed consecutively. In the meantime, the technique of prolepsis was used through the dreams of the characters such as Yusuf, the jailed youth, and the king of Egypt. The characters of the story were presented mainly by dialogues. The main character, Yusuf, got the largest portion of the narrator’s concern, but his brothers also enjoyed a fairly detailed narration. The sequence of their episodes and continuous internal conflicts contributed in constructing them as vivid, developing, complicated, and round characters.