Published in: Iranica, November 25, 2025

Introduction

Silence, often perceived merely as the absence of sound or speech, functions in narrative and literary contexts as a complex and generative phenomenon. It is not simply muteness or void; rather, it constitutes a deliberate absence within the semiotic chain that invites interpretation and engagement. In written narratives, silence refers to elements that are left unstated, unrepresented, or absent in the text, yet still influence the reader’s understanding of the story. It may manifest as omitted lines, words, or events that shape interpretation and generate meaning through what is not explicitly told.

In literary studies, silence has been addressed from multiple angles. Scholars such as Politi (1998),¹ Massey (2003),² Schwalm (1998),³ Tseng (2002),⁴ and Glenn (2004)⁵ examine various theoretical dimensions of silence, while sociolinguistic researchers—including Bruneau (1973, 1988, 2007),⁶ Huckin (2002),⁷ Kurzon (1997, 2007),⁸ Tannen (1985),⁹ Saville-Troike (1985, 1994),¹⁰ and Jaworski (1993, 1997, 2000)¹¹—focus primarily on silence in speech and language use. These approaches, though valuable, often overlook the function of silence as a narrative strategy that structures the story itself. This study, by contrast, investigates the role of narrative silence in shaping fictional worlds, emphasizing how stories are structured by what is intentionally left untold.

Key theorists in literary and narratological studies have explored related concepts. Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the “blanks” (1978)¹² highlights the reader’s active role in completing indeterminate spaces left by the author, while Gérard Genette’s concept of gap-reading (1982)¹³ emphasizes narrative omissions that demand imaginative supplementation. Meir Sternberg (1987)¹⁴ describes a network of informational gaps through which meaning emerges via the reader’s active reconstruction. Lubomír Doležel (1995)¹⁵ and David Herman (2009)¹⁶ consider these gaps as inherent features of fictional worlds rather than flaws. Similarly, Denis Kurzon (1997), Michal Ephratt (2018), and Thomas Huckin (2002) demonstrate that silence—whether as blank spaces, pauses, or rhetorical gaps—produces meaning precisely through its absence, functioning as a semiotic and communicative tool. Literary examples, such as the blank pages in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, illustrate how silence foregrounds unspoken or unshown content, eliciting interpretive and imaginative activity from the reader.

Building on these perspectives, silence in narrative can be understood as a cognitive and semiotic mechanism: it creates a space where meaning is not delivered directly but constructed through the reader’s or viewer’s engagement. By leaving elements unstated, narrative silence stimulates the mind to anticipate, infer, and conceptually complete missing information. Drawing on Sadeghi’s typology (2008, 2010, 2013, 2015),¹⁷ this study distinguishes structural, semantic, and implicational forms of silence in cinematic and literary narratives, each contributing differently to audience engagement and meaning-making. Cognitive research provides a framework for understanding these processes, showing that just as the mind reconstructs incomplete visual or sensory input, it similarly interprets narrative gaps to form coherent understandings. In this sense, silence is not merely an aesthetic or formal device but a cognitive tool, mobilizing attention, memory, and inferential reasoning to generate meaning from absence.

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