One of the most distinctive features of Rumi’s narratives in Mathnavi is blending the stories with each other. The narrator in the midst of the story digresses to another story, links to each other two sequential stories, or sometimes narrates two stories simultaneously. Discussing the technical features of “intersectional narration” and its history and theories the researcher in this paper explains the distinctive features of the form of narration in Mathnavi.

In this paper, Persian short storyis studied in the light ofTzvetanTodorov’s Narrative Theory. The hypothesis of this research is that there are various types of relations among the sequences, and each relation serves one or more functions. For this purpose, seven collections of Persianshort stories written by outstanding writers were selected. These collections consist of 63 short stories, beginningwith Jamalzadeh, the founder of this genre in Persian literature, and ending with Ahmad Mahmoud covering a period of fifty years. After analyzing deductively the selected stories it is demonstrated that there are many kinds of relations among the sequences of narratives, such as contrastive relation, memorial relation and stichomythic relation. In addition, each of these relations serves some functions, such as prescience, foregrounding of the story’s content and creation of suspense.