The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl is a highly symbolic and metaphorical text that mixes elements of traditional parable and modernist literary techniques. The entire narrative is told from the first-person point of view of an unnamed narrator. He is an unreliable narrator who tells two different versions of the same story in the two different sections of the text. The narrator drifts between dreamlike, drugged, and/or feverish states that distort his narrative. The figures and events are representative of symbolic elements rather than being realistic.

In keeping with the narrator’s dreamlike states and the parable-like framing of the text, the setting is both symbolic and surreal. The geographic setting is the ancient city of Rey. The ancient city of Rey is today part of the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran. Rey was an important and wealthy trading city for ancient Persian peoples. Referring to Rey instead of modern Tehran evokes ancient Persian history. In Part 1, for instance, when digging the grave, the old man finds “a jug, a Regheh flower vase, from the ancient city of Rey” (20). The jug is an important symbol in the text (See: Symbols & Motifs), with the old man’s recovery of the jug suggesting the recovery of the past and the ongoing influence of tradition in the present-day action of the story.

The recovery of the jug occurs during a highly symbolic moment, when the narrator is trying to bury the woman he has dismembered and stuffed into a suitcase. This action represents The Tensions Between Modernity and Tradition with which the narrator struggles. The narrator has intensely desired the beautiful but untouchable woman, and is now trying to attempt to cover up her death. However, in the midst of burying her, the grave digger finds the ancient Persian jug. Thus, even when attempting to bury the ancient past and its traditions, they resurface against the narrator’s will. This tension is underlined by the fact that the narrator attempts to pay the gravedigger for his work with gheran and abbasi, “archaic Iranian monetary units, in use directly prior to the current monetary unit (early 20th century and before)” (20).

Further highlighting the symbolic geography of the burial site, the old man notes that the area in the mountains they go to is “near Shabdolazim” (19). Shabdolazim is a shrine and mosque in Rey. It is the resting spot of Shah Abdol-Azim, a 9th-century Islamic scholar. It is an important pilgrimage site in Shia Islam and evocative of traditional religion. The old man notes, “‘you can’t find a better place than this, you can’t even find a single bird flying here, yes!” (19). The old man describing the lack of birds as a point in the spot’s favor is an unsettling one. In Western literary traditions, the silencing of birdsong or the absence of birds more generally is taken as an ominous sign. In ancient Islamic literary culture, birds are typically a symbol of the human soul and birdsong is seen as a form of prayer.

The absence of birds is therefore ominous, suggesting that around this shrine there are no human souls and no prayer. The implication is that the shrine is a holy site in name only, introducing the theme of The Decay of Religious Belief, a theme that resurfaces more explicitly in Part 2 of the text. This is also an example of how Hedayat plays on the concordances and differences between symbols in Western and ancient Islamic tradition. The old man’s enthusiasm for the location contributes to the creepy, unsettling atmosphere of the scene, while also implying that such forsaken ground is ideal for burying the dismembered corpse of traditions, as symbolized in the dead woman.

In Part 1, the narrator works painting the same image over again on pen cases. This image reoccurs in different forms, often distorted or fractured, throughout the text. The image depicts:

a hunched-over old man that looked like a Hindu yogi, wearing a cloak with a turban wrapped around his head, squatting underneath a cypress tree, who, with an astonished look, placed the index finger of his left hand to his lips—In front of him a damsel in a long black dress, bent over, was offering him a morning glory flower—for between them there was a small stream (5).

The narrator initially states he is unsure where the image came from, but it is later revealed in Part 2 that it is a version of a scene on a curtain in his childhood home. The two figures in the scene reappear as different characters in the text. The old man appears in Part 1 as the narrator’s uncle, in the narrator’s vision, and as the hearse driver. In Part 1, the woman appears in the narrator’s vision as well as a figure outside his home. In Part 2, the woman appears as the narrator’s mother as well as his wife in adulthood and childhood. In a sense, the whole narrative is an exploration of this reoccurring scene, in which the narrator blends into the image itself and struggles to differentiate his visions from reality.

Every element of this image is symbolic, such as the cypress tree. The cypress tree is perennial, meaning it stays green year-round. Due to this quality, it is a common metaphorical symbol in ancient Persian literature that is often connected to Death as an Eternal State. The morning glory is a flower which, if consumed, causes hallucinations, such as those experienced by the narrator. The stream between the figures is later identified as the Suren River, but is more generally symbolic of the separation from people that the narrator suffers: The characters cannot touch because they are alienated from one another, reflecting the deep isolation and loneliness that the narrator feels.