The Marsh is a novella presented as the first person narrative of a young, unnamed, male narrator. The story opens with a dream made up of the narrator’s memories of bathing as a boy, in company with his father and his father’s friends, in Isfahan’s Zayandehrud river. The narrator marries after the death of his father. Gradually he becomes alienated from daily life, and lives out an obsessive imaginary relationship with his dead father. As the novel proceeds we see him withdraw from his wife and her family, as well as from his former friends and job in Tehran, until he—and the reader— are quite unable to distinguish reality from hallucinatory fantasy. The novel ends with an ambiguous closure that may indicate death or a final descent into all-encompassing psychosis.