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, Pages 28-54Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 28-54 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual assault, substance misuse, and still birth.
Part 2 of The Blind Owl opens with the unnamed narrator explaining that he is covered in blood and waiting to be arrested. While he waits, he wants to “bring out on paper these pains [that] have devoured [him]” (28). He is writing only for himself and his shadow. His appearance has changed radically; the day before he looked like an ill young man, but today he looks like an old man with white hair and a harelip. He is afraid to look in the mirror.
He is cut off from the rest of the world, which he calls the “rabble.” This is why he is so focused on memories. He is in his room, which has a closet and two windows that look out on to the city of Rey. One of the views out of his window is that of the butcher. The narrator watches every morning as the butcher selects two dead sheep brought by carriage and butchers them. He can also see an old man wearing a scarf with a random assortment of goods for sale on the ground in front of him, although no one seems to buy them. The narrator’s nanny told him that the old man used to be a potter who kept only one jug from his work.
The narrator’s nanny, Nane-joon, and his wife, whom the narrator refers to only as “whore,” are his only connections to the outside world. The narrator is a first cousin of his wife. The narrator was raised by his wife’s mother, and he married his wife out of love for her mother.
Nane-joon told the narrator that his father and uncle were identical twins. While working in India, his father fell in love with a dancer from the Temple of Lingam, the narrator’s mother. When she got pregnant, she was forced to leave the temple. After the narrator was born, his uncle arrived and fell in love with the dancer too. His uncle tricked her into having sex with him, because he was identical to the narrator’s father. The narrator’s mother then said she would leave both brothers unless they faced the Naja snake trial.
The two men were put into a room with a poisonous snake. The snake bit the narrator’s father; his uncle survived, but his hair turned white from the experience. It was decided the surviving man was the narrator’s uncle because the man did not recognize his son, the narrator, although it is uncertain. The narrator was sent to live with his aunt, his father’s sister. Before sending him away, the narrator’s mother gave him a flask of wine with the snake venom in it. The narrator wonders if his mother is alive and dancing in India.
The narrator describes how his now-wife threw herself at him while her mother was on her deathbed. While he was looking at his dead aunt, his cousin pressed against him and kissed him. At that moment, his uncle walked in wearing a scarf and dryly laughing. The narrator was then obliged to marry his cousin “to save face” (37), particularly as the girl was not a virgin. On their wedding night, she claimed to be on her period and would not let him have sex with her. For two months and four days, she refused to let him touch her.
The narrator eventually realizes she resents him for being obligated to marry him and that she has had many lovers. He tries to rape her, but she fights him off and leaves. The narrator is tortured with the thought that she is having sex with many other men. He is desperate for her to have sex with him. He thinks she gets joy out of torturing him by sleeping with others. As a result of his suffering, the narrator grows increasingly isolated and “crazy” (39). He begins to lose weight and grows pale.
The doctor arrives and he prescribes a number of “strange oils and extracts” (40) like frankincense and chamomile oil. While his nanny looks after the narrator, she tells him stories about his past and that of his wife. For example, she tells him that his wife has chewed the fingernails of her left hand since she was a girl. The narrator is sick and feverish with a cough. He feels someone comforting him and his nanny later tells him it was his wife. He waits for her to come back for two years and four months. At night, he has strange dreams and he feels his arm has taken on a mind of its own. He feels that he is decomposing and dissolving.
When he feels a little better, he runs away and out the city gates. He arrives at a mountain that has a river, the Suren River, running through it. While sitting near a fort on the banks of the river, he sees a small girl in a black dress biting the fingernails on her left hand. He isn’t sure if she is real, but he thinks she might be from the ancient city of Rey. It reminds him of when his cousin fell into the river when they were playing as children, and he saw her naked.
The narrator walks back to town and goes to his father-in-law’s house. He gives his brother-in-law two kolooches (a kind of biscuit). Then, the narrator kisses his brother-in law, just as his father-in-law leaves the house while wearing a scarf and laughing. The narrator feels ashamed and goes home. His nose starts to bleed and he passes out on his bed. Before losing consciousness, the narrator looks at himself in the mirror and does not recognize himself. The narrator lies in bed and thinks about death until he falls asleep.
He dreams that he is in the town square, where they have hung the old peddler. His aunt is there asking the policemen to hang the narrator, too. The narrator wakes up and looks at the jug of water. His hand moves and breaks the jug. His nanny arrives with food. The narrator reflects that he is closer with his nanny than with his wife. He thinks about how in the winter as children they would all sleep around the heater, with a curtain hanging in the doorway showing a Hindu yogi under a cypress tree playing a sitar-like instrument while a girl danced. When the image scared him, his nanny would comfort him.
That afternoon, when the narrator's nanny brings him food, he screams. His wife arrives and she is pregnant. The doctor comes and prescribes the narrator opium. Later, the narrator overhears his nanny tell his wife that the doctor did not think he would recover. His nanny tells him stories of miracles and brings him a prayer book, but the narrator feels that religion is "childish." He feels suffering is meaningless and that he lives between life and death, "a moving corpse” (54).
Part 2, Pages 28-54 Analysis
Part 2 of The Blind Owl is a retelling of the events portrayed in Part 1, with differences that underscore the extent to which the narrator is unreliable. Part 1 is told in a highly symbolic, allegorical mode. While elements of this mode persist in Part 2, Part 2 contains more concrete and realistic touches. Part 1 is reminiscent of traditional Persian literary modes of romantic allegory, whereas Part 2 reflects the techniques of modernist literature, in which elements of classical literature are fractured, made visceral, and then recombined in novel ways. This is in part shown in the repetition of figures in differing forms throughout the novella.
This process is most clearly seen by comparing the figure of the young woman across the two Parts. In Part 1, the young woman is first shown in a religious image that the narrator paints repeatedly. She then appears as “ethereal” in a vision of that same image. Her final appearance in Part 1 is as a silent, inhuman “tortured angel” (13) who dies after drinking wine. In each instance, the woman is shown as a classical literary ideal often found in Persian literature. She is a graceful, chaste, virginal dancer offering flowers, who inspires lust but who is nevertheless ultimately untouchable and inviolable until her death. She is so unreal that the narrator struggles to capture or even clearly see the features of her face.
In Part 2, the character is transformed into a material woman with clearly visible features and sexual desire, who then gets pregnant. In Part 2, the young woman is first introduced as the narrator’s mother, “a virgin Bogam Dasi girl, a dancer at the temple of Lingam” (33). Her looks are then described in great detail as a woman who sweats and smells while dancing to the songs “played by naked, turbaned men” (34). She has sex with the narrator’s father and is then turned away from the temple. She ultimately abandons her son. Far from being an inviolable, idealized female figure, this version of the dancing woman has sex, sweats, and transgresses social norms by abandoning her son. For all of these modern elements, there is still an aspect of the religious and mythical to her portrayal. She works as a religious dancer and convinces the narrator’s father to convert to her religion, translated as “the Lingam religion,” presumably a form of Hinduism focused on the symbolic representation of the god Shiva, the god of destruction and time and the patron of the arts.
When she learns of the narrator’s uncle’s trick, the narrator’s mother has the brothers do the Naja snake trial, which has elements of religious fable. Finally, she leaves her son with a flask of wine poisoned with the snake’s venom, which is a recurring element throughout the narrative. This goes to the core of the theme of The Tensions Between Modernity and Tradition: Rather than modern literature entirely breaking with tradition, classical elements are reincorporated within more realistic frameworks. This creates the surrealist atmosphere that characterizes the whole of The Blind Owl.
In Part 2, the theme of Death as an Ideal Eternal State comes to the fore. The narrator is obsessed with death. He thinks about it to fall asleep, which is symbolically important as a state that is an approximation of death. The narrator’s obsession with death is incited by his wife’s sexual rejection, which draws a connection between love and death in the narrative: He writes that “her love, in essence, was at one with filth and death” (39, emphasis added). He resents her for her bold sexuality and for her relations with other men, with his unreciprocated longing for her leading him to disintegrate. Notably, this is a material description of the idealized, unrealized sexual desire typical of classical Persian literature and poetry, such as that described between the narrator and the figure of the woman in Part 1.
However, in the more realistic narrative of Part 2, this unrequited love dynamic causes the narrator to physically deteriorate. Of this miserable state of being, he writes, “I was torn from nature and the illusory world, and was willing to be destroyed and obliterated in the current of eternity—Several times I whispered to myself, ‘Death…death…where are you?’” (48). To the narrator, the only “real” world, stripped of artifice, is the world as experienced in death, of which the world in dreams or while under the influence of opium is the closest approximation he can achieve.
The narrative of The Blind Owl is series of repeated, mirrored, and fractured images (See: Symbols & Motifs), with events that cycle over again throughout the text. With dream-like logic, characters turn into one another (e.g., the narrator into the old peddler) and events repeat in slightly altered forms (e.g., the narrator has sex with the woman’s corpse in Part 1, and will later murder the woman during sex in Part 2). This mirrored, but slightly distorted, repetition is also present in the language of the text itself. For instance, the houses in the town are described in similar, but slightly different ways: “strange and peculiar houses” (23), “houses with strange and peculiar shapes” (44), “strange and peculiar houses, in cut-up geometrical shapes” (48), “strange and peculiar geometrically shaped houses” (57), etc.
This use of language creates a kaleidoscopic image of the setting in which discrete but consistent elemental parts are constantly being reordered to unsettling effect. The setting’s imagery in Part 2 is highly modernist and evocative of the stark, geometric shapes seen in surrealist paintings, such as those of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street.” As a writer in Paris in the 1920s, Hidayat would have been familiar with this kind of surrealist imagery. In the narrative, the narrator’s use of such surrealism creates a world in which even the most seemingly concrete elements become fluid and unpredictable, reinforcing the sense that the narrator is gradually losing his sense of linear time and is struggling to distinguish his fantasies from reality.
