The Narrative Structure of the Fairy Tale and the Functions of the Hero: A Proppian Comparative Analysis of Traditional and AI-Generated English and Uzbek Tales

Almost a century ago, Vladimir Propp showed that, beneath their endless variety, wonder tales are built from a limited set of recurring plot elements, or “functions”, arranged in a stable order: a lack or villainy, the hero’s departure, a test by a donor, the gift of a magical agent, a struggle, victory, return and, often, a wedding. Uzbek and English tales share much of this skeleton, but each tradition also has its own formulas and rhythms: the Uzbek “Bor ekan-yo’q ekan” and “murod-maqsadiga yetibdi”, the forty days of travel and forty days of wedding celebration, the English “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after”, and the rule of three that runs through both. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini now retell existing tales and invent new “folk tales” on request. This raises a structural question: do AI tales follow the morphology of the folk tale, or a different narrative logic?