From Marginalization to Sanctification: Representation of the Different Body in “My Little Prayer Room” by Houshang Golshiri

Introduction

Literature has always served as a field for reflecting human experiences; a platform where humans, with all their diversity and complexities, are portrayed. At the same time, literature provides a foundation for a wide range of interdisciplinary studies. In Disability Studies—a newly emerging and interdisciplinary field that constitutes a discourse on disability—exists a literary approach in which literary texts are analyzed with a focus on disabled characters. Attention to disabled characters as one of the main narrative elements in Persian literature remains blurred and underdeveloped. In the story “My Little Prayer Room”, a physical feature such as having an extra toe causes the protagonist to face discriminatory and exclusionary behaviors from others, while he himself perceives that additional member in a non-stereotypical way and, the story is his direct narration of the lived experience of having a different body. The research question that the present article seeks to answer—using sociological and narratological considerations—is how the narrative devices in this story function in representing the marginalized character.

Literature Review

Research on “disability” or “disabled characters” in Persian literature remains generally limited. Existing studies can be broadly categorized into two main areas: Persian literature and Children’s and young adult literature. In the existing essays in Persian literature, disability has predominantly been examined in classical texts—mostly poetry—and no short story centering on disability has been analyzed. In the field of children’s and young adult literature, disability has occasionally been addressed independently, and at other times under broader concepts such as “otherness” and “minority.”
Importantly, besides the scarcity of research on disability in Persian literature in general and, more specifically, in Persian fiction literature, there are very few scholarly articles dedicated to the story “My Little Prayer Room”. The limited number of studies that do engage with this story tend to approach it from psychoanalytic or narratological perspectives.
The primary rationale for conducting such research within literary studies lies in the necessity to pay closer attention to the characterization of figures who are often rendered invisible in the text. While disabled characters are not scant in Persian short stories, the existing scholarly background reveals significant gaps regarding how these characters are portrayed, how their bodies and disabilities are represented, their narrative functions, and related issues. The present article aims to address part of these research deficiencies.

Discussion

“My Little Prayer Room” is a short story about Hassan, a 35-year-old man who has an extra toe next to the little toe on his left foot. According to dominant social classifications, this physical difference has led to him being labeled as disabled. In this story, the narrator is marginalized or humiliated by others due to this bodily difference. Thus, he lives the disability experience through the lens of discrimination. Told as a monologue, the narrator recalls memories of how his parents and others reacted to this additional toe. The central conflict arises when he wishes to marry a girl who, upon seeing the extra toe, insists that he remove it surgically. Hassan refuses, and this ultimately leads to their separation. Now, as he reflects on these memories while describing his sixth toe, he feels a bittersweet mixture of sorrow and joy.
3.1. Dualities
The story highlights two fundamental dualities: the duality of "stranger" and "familiar," and the duality of "darkness" and "light." Both of these dualities significantly influence the narrator’s perception of himself, others, the surrounding environment, and his different body.
In general, the stranger–familiar duality can be examined on two levels: the literal and the terminological. On the literal level, "stranger" and "familiar" refer to non-relatives and relatives. In this sense, only the narrator’s parents belong to the category of the familiar, while all others are considered as strangers. On the terminological level, however, these terms correspond to the notions of “Other” and “Self,” carrying historically and socially constructed meanings that vary across different contexts. In other words, the stranger–familiar duality on the terminological level aligns with the socially constructed categories of self and other in the social sciences. The key difference between these two levels lies in the flexibility of the “strangers” group on the terminological level.
An important aspect in this story is the inversion of this duality. Commonly, others are labeled as strangers by the self and the able-bodied majority, but here the situation is reversed. In Hassan’s narrative, it is the able-bodied majority who are categorized as strangers and others. This inversion demonstrates the fluidity of the concepts of self and other, illustrating that within each group exists patterns that nonconformity to those patterns leads to the creation of boundaries and margins.
Another key duality in the story is that of darkness and light. The first notable point concerning the sixth toe, which is repeatedly emphasized, is that this body part exists both in darkness and in light. For Hassan, the quality of the sixth toe in darkness is associated with concepts such as loneliness, disconnection, invisibility despite presence, disappearance of boundaries, absence of valuation, and ultimately, emancipation. Conversely, the quality of the same member in the light is linked with connection, visibility despite presence, marking boundaries, valuation, and constraint. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Hassan views darkness as a positive and liberating concept, which he prefers over the restrictions imposed by light and visibility.
3.2. Narrator
This story features an autodiegetic narrative—that is, the narrator, the main character, and the disabled individual are the same. Moreover, autodiegetic narratives typically employ internal focalization, which is also present here. The narrator is a dynamic character, as his perspective on his different body evolves from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. He is also a complex character, since the meaning or nature of his extra toe remains somewhat mysterious to him up until the moment of narration. This autodiegetic narrative is delivered through a monologue, though not of the interior kind; rather, it takes the form of a dramatic monologue. Accordingly, Hassan’s narration is rhetorical in tone, and he frequently references the presence of an implied narratee throughout his storytelling.
3.3. Language and Mode of Narration
Hassan’s narrative does not follow a linear chronology; rather, it unfolds through a structure that moves between the present moment and frequent retrospections. The narrator, now thirty-five years old, revisits and relives past memories in the present moment. This mode of narration differs from the subsequent narration, in which the central event has already occurred and concluded, and the story is typically recounted in the past tense. In “My Little Prayer Room”, however, the narrator alternates between past and present tenses, presenting the past not as a finished event but as a living, ongoing concept.
In addition to its non-linear structure—which at times complicates the tracking of the plot—the narrative also includes sentences that seem obscure, incomplete, or semantically ambiguous, which reveals the narrator’s fragmented mental state. Overall, the narrative feels more like spoken language than written prose. This is evident in the syntactic dislocations more common in speech, as well as in the mental associations, discontinuities, and digressions that result in ungrammatical, unfinished, or logically fragmented sentences.

Conclusion

The autodiegetic narrator of “My Little Prayer Room” adopts a critical and explicit tone to challenge stereotypical discourses. He attributes his marginalization to classificatory gazes—gazes that define a “normal” foot as having five toes, thereby marking any difference in toe count as departure from norm and abnormality. This critical tone, combined with the narrator’s unmediated perspective on his own experiences, distances the story from reductive and clichéd representations, achieving instead a distinctive and authentic narrative. In this story, the narrator, as a disabled individual, depicts his life and challenges without the mediation of an able-bodied character. This very quality sets the story apart from many similar narratives that present the experiences of disabled individuals from an outsider’s point of view.
The story’s focus on the lived experience of inhabiting a different body, told through the voice of the disabled character himself, creates an opportunity for readers to engage more directly with the complexities and nuances of such a life. This kind of storytelling not only offers a more sincere and humanized portrayal of disability but also invites the audience to reconsider their cultural and social assumptions about the body, normalcy, and disability.
By employing narrative techniques such as an autodiegetic narrator, internal focalization, monologue, and a critical tone, “My Little Prayer Room” transcends the level of mere representation, and becomes a profound and thought-provoking work that challenges common stereotypes and creates space in literature for the lived experiences of disabled individuals. Thus, the story’s representation is non-stereotypical and unmediated.