37 pages • 1 hour read
Sadegh HedayatThe Blind Owl
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
The unnamed narrator of The Blind Owl acts as the protagonist in the narrative. At the beginning of the novella, the narrator describes his work painting pen cases that his uncle takes to India and sells. In the second part of the text, he abandons his painting to write a narrative account of the events of his life. The narrator is highly unreliable; he often contradicts himself or portrays events in ways that are favorable to him. For instance, he describes in his written narrative overhearing the night watchmen singing a song about the wine of the land of Rey. Later, he sings the song to himself with the note, “I do not know where I had heard the song that I sang to myself” (64), an obvious untruth.
The narrator’s untruths can be read as an effort to paint a more favorable depiction of his own actions, particularly in his relationship with his wife, whom he murders at the end of his narrative. He justifies his actions by describing her as a “whore” who is sleeping with other men, including the old peddler, and who shows him no love or affection. However, these claims are ambiguous. At the end of the narrative, the narrator sees that he is himself the peddler, raising the possibility that he was the one who impregnated his wife in the form of the peddler. Furthermore, she treats him with kindness when he is sick: “[She] had come to my bedside and placed my head on her lap and rocked me like a baby” (41). The wife’s concern and care for the narrator implies that she may be a better companion than his view of her suggests.
The narrator’s untruths are also emblematic of his mental and physical disintegration over the course of the narrative. The narrator introduces his narrative by stating that he withdrew from the world after seeing a vision of a beautiful woman: “[I]n order to forget I sought refuge in opium and wine—The entire day my life used to and continues to pass between the four walls of my room” (4). His opium smoking and wine drinking are habitual. His substance dependency and isolation, coupled with his obsessive focus on the idealized woman, lead to his physical deterioration. In Part 2, he suffers from a fever. His body becomes emaciated. His physical transformation is complete when his hair turns white after murdering his wife, just like his father/uncle’s did following the snake trial.
The narrator’s physical decline corresponds with his mental decline. This is represented in the language of the text itself, which is full of recursive notions and obsessive thoughts of death, as when he thinks about death before falling asleep: “Was not my room a coffin? Was not my bedding colder and darker than a grave?” (59). In addition to these manifest signs of mental decline, he has uncontrolled outbursts and loses control of his body, such as when he feels his arm “would start working without [his] being able to take control of, or interfere with, its movements” (42). This lack of control and other symptoms he describes as “a strange and particular kind of dissolution and decomposition” (43).
The narrator acts as an anti-hero in his violence and rejection of others. Rather than taking action as a traditional hero would do, the world acts upon him and he responds in increasingly antisocial and isolating ways. Following his recitation of the murder of his wife, the narrator realizes that he is, in fact, an avatar of death covered in blood and soil, surrounded by flies and maggots, and feeling “the weight of a corpse” (78) pressing against him, which suggests that his isolation and break with reality is now complete.
The Old Man (Uncle/Father/Hearse-Driver/Peddler)
The character of the old man in The Blind Owl reoccurs several times throughout the narrative in different forms, with slight alterations in keeping with the mirrored but fractured structure of the text and its language. The old man is overall representative of religious practice and traditional Iranian life and culture, with slightly different aspects depending on his manifestation.
The old man first appears in the text as a Hindu yogi that the narrator paints repeatedly on the pen boxes. In this iteration, the old man has two of the accessories he is frequently depicted with, a cloak and a turban wrapped around his head (which is elsewhere described as a scarf). In this form, he represents classical religious imagery and a potential source of wisdom. The old man soon appears materially in the form of the narrator’s uncle and his aspect undermines this romantic, idealized image. Like the yogi, he is wearing a shawl and a turban; however, the narrator regards him as unattractive and uninspiring: “[H]e had a harelip and red, festering eyelids” (6). The narrator describes the old man in this appearance as a distorted mirrored version of himself. Later in Part 1, the old man appears as the driver of a hearse. Like the idealized image of the yogi, he is sitting under a cypress. Instead of a turban, he has a scarf wrapped around his face. He helps the narrator bury the body of the woman and gives him an ancient jug.
In Part 2, it is revealed that the narrator’s uncle may possibly be his father, as it is not clear which twin brother survived the Naja snake trial. It is at this point the old man is described as having white hair. In front of the narrator’s house in Part 2 is a peddler selling his wares whom the narrator can see from his window. The peddler, like the narrator’s uncle/father, wears a turban and a shawl, has a harelip, and white hair. Instead of red eyelids, he has “red eyes, it was as if his eyelids had been cut off” (57). The narrator suspects the peddler of sleeping with his wife, and while this disturbs the narrator, he notes that the peddler “was the representative and manifestation of Creation” (66).
When the narrator has sex with his wife, she bites his lip as if looking for the peddler’s harelip. Following the narrator’s murder of his wife, he looks in the mirror and sees that he has “become the old peddler” (77) himself. The figure of the old man has transformed from an idealized image into an embodied element of the narrator himself.
The Young Woman (The Image/The Dancer/The Narrator's Wife/The Narrator's Mother)
Like the old man, the young woman is highly figurative, with recurring forms throughout the text. In her first representation, she is shown in the picture painted by the narrator on the pen box as “a damsel in a long black dress” (5). The narrator’s wife as a young girl is also described as wearing a long black dress. The representation of the woman in the picture is a poetic ideal of a chaste, erotically desirable, but ultimately untouchable female form. Later in Part 1, the depicted woman is seen in the narrator’s vision. This vision sparks his decline, as he abandons the world in order to search for her. Later, she manifests outside his house wearing a black dress. However, before he can touch her, she dies. After having sex with her dead corpse, the narrator dismembers the woman and buries her with the assistance of the old man.
In Part 2, the young woman appears in the figure of the narrator’s own mother. The narrator’s mother is a Bogam Dasi dancer in the temple who abandons her son with his aunt. The connection between the narrator’s mother and the image of the woman he paints on the pen cases becomes clear when it is revealed that the image was inspired by an image on a curtain in the narrator’s childhood bedroom, of “a Hindu yogi was sitting underneath a cypress tree […] and a beautiful young girl like Bogam Dasi […] they had fastened her hands as if she was forced to dance in front of the old man” (50).
Finally, the young woman is the narrator’s wife, especially as he remembers her in childhood. He describes a memory of her near the Suren River, where she is walking under a cypress dress wearing a thin black dress. However, when she becomes pregnant and a mature, embodied woman, he grows to fear her, which in part prompts his desire to take her life.
Nane-joon
Nane-joon is the only named character in the narrative. The name Nane-joon means roughly “Mother [of] the Essential Soul” in Persian. She is the narrator’s nanny, aunt, and mother of the narrator’s wife—the narrator and his wife are first cousins.
Nane-joon is the only character in the text for whom the narrator expresses respect and affection. He describes her as a “tall woman with grey hair” (32). Nane-joon takes the narrator in after he is abandoned by his parents. The narrator says that he loves her as if she were his own mother, because he never knew his own mother. He states that he married her daughter “because of this love” (32).
When he is an adult, Nane-joon cares for him in his illness by sending for the doctor, administering various medications, cleaning his room, and preparing meals. It is implied by the narrator that she is supportive of him over the interests of her own daughter. Nane-joon tells the narrator about her daughter’s promiscuity and gives the narrator the knife he uses in the murder. However, she is also overheard wishing for his death. Her role in the narrator’s deterioration is also somewhat ambiguous. She initially gives the narrator opium to help treat his symptoms, but later takes it away when he grows increasingly erratic and dependent on the substance. In essence, Nane-joon is an idealized mother and caretaker to the narrator, even though she ultimately betrays her own daughter by giving the narrator the murder weapon.
