Admonition, exemplification, ordeal, antithesis, and symbolic imagery each shape a listener's moral understanding through a distinct expressive device, but none of them, by itself, confirms that the resulting moral lesson is true. In the Uzbek “Goʻroʻgʻli” epic cycle this confirming function is performed by a sixth mechanism located not in any single device but in the compositional close of the narrative itself. This study aims to identify the stable typological forms of this final-reward, or poetic-justice, mechanism across the closing episodes of the “Goʻroʻgʻli” dastans and to relate this typology theoretically to Uzbek folklore scholarship on tale composition and to pedagogical theory on the method of reward and punishment. Using comparative-typological textual analysis, we examined the closing episode of each sampled dastan principally Forty Youths and Forty Maidens, The Sentencing of Avazkhon to Death, and The Birth of Goʻroʻgʻli, supplemented by closing passages from Yunus the Fairy, Gulqizoy, and Sarvinoz and coded each discrete closing event (marriage, restoration to a throne, punishment, collective celebration) by the typological function it performs. Three interlocking types emerged: the hero's attainment of his goal (positive reward, realized on social-political and familial-emotional levels), evil meeting its own punishment (negative reward, realized in either a tragic or a comic register depending on the antagonist's degree of threat), and collective festive celebration (a ritual closure that unites the first two types in a single communal event). These three types were found to co-occur within single closing episodes rather than to operate in isolation. The final-reward mechanism does not introduce a new moral idea but reinforces, through the authority of compositional closure, the moral conclusions already established by the cycle's other mechanisms, and it offers a folklore-grounded rationale for concluding problem-based or role-play literature lessons with an explicit, merit-linked act of recognition rather than an unconditional happy ending.
Deserved Endings: A Typology of The Final-Reward (Poetic-Justice) Mechanism in The Uzbek “GOʻROʻGʻLI” Epic Cycle
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