Comparing allegorical narratives of \"Elephant in the city of the blind\" from Sanaei and Ghazali with respect to the theory of hypertextuality

The allegorical narratives of \"Elephant in the city of the blind\" written by Sanei in his book Hadigh al-Hadigheh are based on Kimiyaye Sa’adat penned by Ghazali. The aim of this study was to explore the hypertextual relationship of these two versions. To this purpose, using Gerard Genette’ theory of hypertextuality, the link between Sanaei and Ghazali’s versions was investigated with the results suggesting the presence of some text size variations and new semantic implications that could be analyzed based on quantitative transformation and pragmatic transformation. The former revealed that Sanaei had employed augmentation in his version by expanding the number of proportions from 21 in Ghazali’s version to 42 in his narrative. The latter was examined in two semantic layers. Transformations in the first layer consisted of changes in characters and events made by Sanaei. In the second layer, transformations indicated that with respect to the inability of the intellect in knowing God, Sanaei had just extended what his ancestors had stated about intellect and ego of man to the common intellect and soul, positing that the human and world intellect and ego are incapable of construing the divine mysteries either individually or collectively