Deconstructive narratives, decreasing doublets, deceptive cadences, and the design of circles: strategies for building a closure in the Arabian nights

Abstract

While the beginning of the frame narrative in The Thousand and One Nights has generated many interpretations, its ending has gone almost unnoticed. This article discusses various narrative strategies for constructing an ending. The examples are taken from a corpus of texts consisting of the Arabic collection Alf layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights”) as it existed in the 9th/15th century and the so-called “orphan stories,” the tales Ḥannā Diyāb (c. 1688 – after 1763) told to Antoine Galland (1646–1715), who published them in expanded form in volumes nine through twelve of his Mille et une nuit[s]. It is argued that The Thousand and One Nights are by no means an arbitrary compilation of stories. On the contrary, they are a carefully crafted literary composition. This is particularly evident in the way of constructing narrative closures which create a feeling of satisfactory completion. This is demonstrated by pointing to narrative devices discovered in literary studies of works of the highest stratum of world literatures. It also advocates studying the work in its original form, the text of which has yet to be reconstructed.