Sheherzad’s Life and Death: Interrogating Aspects of Narrative and Narration in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and “The Death of Sheherzad”

Shritama Mukherjee

Sheherzad’s Life and Death: Interrogating Aspects of Narrative and Narration in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and “The Death of Sheherzad”

Author(s)	Ms. Shritama Mukherjee
Country	India
Abstract	The character of Sheherzad in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment has been known for her quick wit and the exemplary manner in which she is able to save her life when many others before her failed to do the same. She employs the power of narration as her means of escape from imminent death. In doing so, she weaves a web of narrative around her that, at once, is an escape and an entanglement at the same time. Her narrative, her story feeds off her narration; her stories are a part and extension of herself. They enable her to live, sustain her life and, therefore, when the danger of losing her life is over and she does not need to live by her narration anymore, her narrative suffers. She is relegated to the domain of the ordinary, the unadventurous, as the thrill of enjoying another day through the power of her words and she is forgotten. A distinction needs to be made between the character that Sheherzad is and the characters she conjures in her narration. She is unlike her characters. Conflating her narrative with her narration is an erroneous view of the story. She is her own woman, not a means to an end, or a tool for the stories in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. This is where Intizar Hussain’s “The Death of Sheherzad” becomes crucial to our understanding of the protagonist. The methodology of the paper would be to examine the intricacies of narrative and narration and distinguish the two vis-à-vis the character of Sheherzad as also to gauge the efficacy of the character as either the ‘focalizer’ or the ‘focalized’ by employing Mieke Bal’s concepts on narratology. It will be the contention of this paper to dissociate the character of Sheherzad from her stories and the exploration of her fate as she loses control of her narrative is subsumed within the narrative set for her by external agencies.
Keywords	Narrative, narration, focalizer, story-narrative dyad, Arabian Nights’ Entertainment
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On	2026-04-04

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Sheherzad’s Life and Death: Interrogating Aspects of Narrative and Narration in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and “The Death of Sheherzad”

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