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.
Part 2, Page 55-Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 55-77 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of murder, substance misuse, violence, and stillbirth.
That evening, the narrator gets up from the opium brazier and looks out the window. He hears the call to prayer and night watchmen singing about wine from the Land of Rey. Next to the curtain by the door, he sees a figure he recognizes from his childhood that reminds him of the butcher’s face. The figure fades. The narrator looks in the mirror, but he does not recognize his own face. He thinks of death and goes to sleep.
He dreams that whenever he touches someone, their head falls off. He sees the old peddler carrying a jackknife, and then his head falls off. The narrator runs away and goes to his father-in-law’s house. He offers his brother-in-law kolooches, but when he touches his brother-in-law, the man’s head falls off. The narrator screams and wakes up.
Nane-joon comes in with his breakfast and sweeps his room. While she sweeps, the narrator watches the butcher. Then, the narrator goes back into his room and gets out his jackknife. He decides to kill his wife. Mourners walk by his window carrying a coffin. The butcher walks behind the coffin, but the peddler ignores it. The narrator thinks his room is a coffin. He longs for death. He thinks about everything that he fears, such as the fear of coughing up blood. He remembers how at the bathhouse a few nights ago, he saw his skinny shadow. He thinks that his life is as “unnatural, unknown and unbelievable” (63) as the picture of the yogi and the dancer on his pen case.
He smokes more opium and looks at himself in the mirror again. He decides he likes the way he looks. Nane-joon comes in and he laughs at her. She takes the opium away and sings the nightwatchmen’s song about wine from the Land of Rey, although he does not know where it comes from.
His nanny tells him that she saw the old peddler going to his wife’s room and she overhead his wife saying to him, “‘Unwrap your scarf’” (65). The narrator remembers that the day he had screamed and his wife came to his room, he had gone to see the peddler, who gave him the jug. Nane-joon says his wife had to go to the bathhouse because her bedding had fleas after sleeping with the peddler.
The narrator’s wife comes to see him. He thinks about how different she looks from when she was a girl. She asks him how he is doing and he replies, “‘Aren’t you free, don’t you do whatever you like—what’s my health to you?’” (67). Angry, she leaves. Then she returns and he cries while hugging her legs. When he wakes up, she is gone. He looks at himself in the mirror and is terrified of his appearance. He begins to laugh gratingly, and then coughs up blood. Nane-joon stares at him, looking frightened, and the narrator hides himself behind the curtain.
He falls asleep while rubbing his body. He wakes up when he hears the night watchmen singing about wine from the Land of Rey. He thinks about the snake-venom wine he could drink to take his own life and fantasizes about making his wife drink some, too. He thinks this would be an expression of true love.
The narrator gets up and wraps his face in a scarf. Then, he goes into his wife’s room with his jackknife. From behind a door, he hears a sneeze and a laugh. He decides not to kill her, and so leaves the room and throws away the knife. However, he has taken her dress and sleeps with it. The next morning, when Nane-joon brings him breakfast, she also brings him back his jackknife. They talk about his wife’s pregnancy.
That afternoon, his brother-in-law comes to see the narrator. His brother-in-law tells him that soon the narrator will die and the house will be theirs, as long as the baby is not stillborn (because of Iranian law). The narrator laughs dryly and the brother-in-law runs away, frightened.
The narrator thinks about the pleasure the butcher gets when cutting up the sheep. The narrator feels superior to other people because he “felt the eternal and perpetual current within [him]” (74). He feels as if he is talking to himself, but his lips aren’t moving.
As night falls, the narrator sees his shadow on the wall. He has become owl-like, saying, “but my wailings had become stuck in my throat and I spat them out in the form of blood clots” (74). He thinks about how his owl-shadow is reading what he is writing and understands it. The narrator’s bedroom feels like a suffocating coffin. He thinks about death while he falls asleep. Before he falls asleep, he hears the nightwatchmen pass beneath his window singing the song about wine from the Land of Rey.
The narrator’s fever breaks and he feels superhumanly powerful. He wraps himself in a cloak and a yellow scarf and gets out his jackknife. He walks toward his wife’s room. He hears her say, “‘Take off your scarf’” (75). He goes into her room and undresses. He embraces her and thinks about what she was like as a small girl when they played by the banks of the Suren River. They have sex and she bites his lip hard. He stabs her and she dies.
He coughs dryly, covers himself in the cloak, and returns to his room. His hands are bloody. He looks at himself in the mirror and sees that his hair has turned white, and he looks like an old man. He holds his hands in front of his face and laughs. He has turned into the old peddler.
Part 3 Summary
The narrator finishes writing his story. He looks around the room for the vase he received from the old man driving the hearse, but he cannot find it. He sees an old man with his head wrapped in a scarf carrying a vase wrapped in a handkerchief in his room. The old man laughs dryly and leaves. The narrator tries to follow him to get the vase, but the old man escapes.
The narrator returns to his room and looks out a window into the alley, where the old man is shaking with laughter while he walks away into the fog. The narrator looks down and sees he is covered in blood and maggots while two greenbottle flies circle around him. He feels a corpse pressing against his chest.
Part 2, Page 55-Part 3 Analysis
In the final section of the novel, there is an escalation of the narrator’s mental and physical deterioration. The culmination of this descent is the murder of his unnamed wife. Throughout the narrative, the narrator has fantasized about Death as an Ideal Eternal State. However, rather than dying by suicide, he takes the life of his wife.
The narrator’s feelings towards his wife are tied to his experience of The Decay of Religious Belief. In the opening of the section, the narrator is awoken by “an ill-timed call to prayer” (55). Observant Muslims pray five times a day, beginning at dawn. The timings are signaled via a prayer broadcast or called from the minaret of a mosque. Describing a call to prayer as “ill-timed” suggests that the narrator finds such regulated religious observance incongruent—it is out of joint with his own experience of the passage of time. The narrator then goes on to speculate that the call to prayer is “perhaps a woman, maybe that whore, was in labor, was busy delivering. The howling of a dog was heard amidst the call to prayer” (55). He associates the religious ritual with his pregnant wife, whom he consistently calls a “whore.” This equation creates a link between sexual digression and traditional religious practice, blurring the lines between the sacred and the profane. Suggesting that his wife is giving birth implies that the purpose of traditional religion is its own perpetuation, and that there is something earthy and worldly about it as opposed to truly transcendent.
The narrator then notes he hears a howling dog during the call to prayer, further complicating the boundaries between sacred and profane and invoking The Tensions Between Modernity and Tradition. In Islam, dogs are considered impure and in modern Iran keeping a dog as a pet is controversial. A dog howling during the Islamic call to prayer thus further highlights the surreal impurity of the religious ritual, echoing the narrator’s earlier connotation of impurity in comparing the call to prayer to the sound of a “whore” giving birth. However, in pre-Islamic Iran under Zoroastrianism, dogs were highly valued creatures, for in Zoroastrian belief dogs are closely associated with the watchful guardians of the dead and souls crossing into the underworld. The dog howling therefore implies that pre-Islamic Iranian culture is breaking through the Islamic religious ritual, once more pointing to the eruption of the past into the present. Finally, given the symbolic meaning of dogs in Zoroastrianism, it suggests that the specter of death is haunting traditional Islam and the narrator himself.
The possible resurrection of pre-Islamic Iranian culture is reinforced by the song repeated multiple times throughout the text, as sung by the nightwatchmen: “Come, let us go and drink wine / Wine from the Land of Rey / If not now then when is the time?” (55). Drinking wine is prohibited in traditional Muslim practice, but is an act commonly referenced in pre-Islamic Persian romantic poetry. Since both the city of Rey and wine-drinking speak to the ancient Iranian past, the song presents a call to action to engage in pre-Islamic practices, offering a reconnection with ancient Persia. Ultimately, the narrator begins to sing the song to himself, which suggests that he is becoming more and more seduced by the idea of the past and more detached from his present.
The narrator’s ambivalent attitude towards both traditional Islamic rituals and the modernity he inhabits connects to his feelings for his wife, whom he keep associating with the constrictions of Islamic religious practice. He feels she resents him after being pressured into the marriage by “an akhoond,” a derogative term for a mullah, or Islamic religious leader, who “made her [the narrator’s] possession by reciting a few Arabic words in her ears” (38). He later writes he can see “the impression of the old man’s dirty, rotting, yellow teeth from which Arabic verses pass through were on [his] wife’s cheek” (65), and wonders why the old peddler has been in front of his house since he married his wife. The references to Arabic here are another explicit link to Islamic religious ritual, as the language of Iran is Farsi or Persian whereas Arabic is used for Islamic prayer. Thus, the narrator and his wife have been bound together in marriage by a traditional Islamic religious practice that is ultimately meaningless to the narrator, and which haunts them in the form of the old peddler.
The narrator explains his embrace of The Decay of Religious Belief when he describes his existential nihilism. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche describes nihilism as a crisis of meaninglessness. In response to this existential crisis, some withdraw from the traditional institutions of the world, including religion, into oneself. As part of this process, the abstract religious god is replaced by individual man as godhead, because when faced with a meaningless world, it is man who creates meaning in the world rather than an omniscient and all-powerful deity.
To this end, shortly before killing his wife, the narrator writes, “Now I understand that I had become a demigod, I was beyond all the base and trivial needs of people, I felt the eternal and perpetual current within me” (74, emphasis added). Crucially, he is only talking to himself in this moment, and throughout the narrative he feels he can only make himself understood by his shadow. The narrator’s solipsism, his collapse into his own world of meanings rather than a worldview ordered by traditional religion, is nearly complete. However, this isolation is continuously disrupted by the reappearance, against the narrator’s will, of traditional signs and symbols, such as the old peddler, suggesting that the narrator’s desire to transcend the limitations of his time and situation are futile.
At the end of the novella, the narrator resolves to kill his wife. In the moment before he makes this decision, he once again hears the nightwatchmen singing the song about wine from the Land of Rey. It is this that seemingly spurs him to go forward with the terrible act despite the risk of being caught. He believes this act will bring him closer to Death as an Ideal Eternal State, and in the moment he is having sex with her he wishes for death. Ironically, he describes their roles as inverted, with himself as the “prey.” At the climax of their intercourse, he stabs her. He believes this will liberate both of them from a fallen state trapped in meaningless religious tradition. The final irony of this action, however, is that it turns him into the old peddler, making the narrator into a symbol of Islamic tradition himself.
This irrepressible resurgence of alternate forms mirrors what occurred in Part 1, when the narrator is trying to bury the dismembered woman but finds an ancient jug that the old man, in the form of the grave digger, pressures him into taking. The narrator’s final transformation, in which he sees himself as a corpse, suggests that he has undergone a final break with his reality, but with death being a state of blood and maggots instead of the transcendence he had envisioned.
