Abstract
This dissertation was inspired by the academic publication “Morphology of the Folk Tale” which is written by a Soviet scholar folklorist Vladimir Propp who studied the basic plot components of Russian folk tales in order to identify their essence narrative elements, and concluded 31 role functions in 1928. This paper used these 31 roles as contrasting research foundation and similarly took 60 stories from the representative work of the classical Zhi-Guai Chinese short story Liaozhai Zhiyi as the researcher’s resources, then concluded 29 functions as the result form this unique classical Chinese short story. This research divided these 29 functions into 4 categories of introduction, elucidation, transition and conclusion, then digest about introduction functions: Going out, Be visited, Deficiency, Association, Awareness; the elucidation functions: Guidance, Inquiring, pleading, Interdiction, Injury, Difficulty, Test; the transition functions: Violation of interdiction, Assistance, Agreement, problem solving, test passed, Appreciation, Test failure, Combination, Child-Delivery, the conclusion functions: Appointment, Rewards after the test, Exposition, Witness, Departure, Reunion, Reveal, Return. In additions, some stories are opened by a starting scene and summing up by an ending scene. For the conclusion of these 29 functions, the researcher used Liaozhai Zhiyi as example, to structurally disassemble and recognize of classical Chinese Zhi Guai short story and contrasted the narrative characteristic differences with western fairy tales.