---

The novelty in typography coupled with narrative techniques has turned Bivatan (Tehran, 2008) into a quasi-metafiction, i.e. a story which explores the process of its own construction. While in Bivatan the author is supposedly trying to produce a metafictional effect, a closer investigation into the novel will prove this claim void. In fact, Amirkhani’s novel fails to step into the realm of postmodernism.

---

Semiotics is an approach that studies the signs and their hidden meanings. This article is a social semiology of Bivatan—amodern novelwritten by Reza Amirkhani. The novel struggles with fundamental issues such as identity, culture, and social traditions. Like most other postmodern novels, Bivatan is a combination of reality and imagination. Most parts of the story happen outside of Iran and show the conflict between Islamic-Persian culture and the Western culture. The conflict between humans and their surrounding is another major aspect of this novel. This article elaborates on the identity-related signs such as religion, food, costume, job, social relations, and so forth. The fundamental role of religion, drawing on Quranicverses, identity crisis, and differences in social class are among the other subjects which will be discussed in this paper.  

---

In contemporary novel, applying a set constrained writing techniques, is a concern of some novelists, since the novel is known as a literary type, which unlike poetic genre, does not follow definite rules and principles.  In French literature, a literary group, called Oulipo, has been able to create unique literary works by devising constrained writing techniques and rules that are particularly used in the novel. The striking point is that some non-Oulipian authors are comparable to the style of this literary group. Raza Amirkhani, the Iranian writer, has created such an Oulipian-like novel in his Bivatan, without knowing Oulipo. This study shows that Amirkhani has been able to create a novel in Persian language, by combining literature and mathematics, alongside challenging the reader by different language and literature games, and most importantly, by observing Jacques Roubaud’s first principle.