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37 pages 1 hour read

Sadegh Hedayat

The Blind Owl

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936

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Themes

The Tensions Between Modernity and Tradition

The dominant theme and structure of The Blind Owl is the tension between modernity and tradition in the narrator’s experience of Iranian life and culture. The narrator feels alienated and adrift in the present, continuously trying and failing to navigate, or even escape from, the pressures of both past and present that surround him.

The form of the narrative is itself demonstrative of tensions between tradition and modernity. The text is broadly divided between two narrative forms, one in each part. The first form is the narrator telling a parable that is rich in symbolism and has a fable-like logic. The second form is the narrator writing a more realistic account of the same events he recounted in parable form. The first part of the narrative is a symbolic representation of traditional Persian literature, as it contains imagery and events evocative of mystical, idealized literary forms common in the Persian classics, particularly a beautiful woman who enchants the narrator in an ecstatic vision brought on by wine. In the second part of the narrative, the young woman is portrayed more realistically: Instead of an idealized virginal woman, she is the narrator’s own pregnant wife who expresses and acts upon sexual desire. Similarly, instead of a mystical death from drinking wine, as described in Part 1, in Part 2 the woman is murdered at the narrator’s own hand. The contrast between an idealized past and a more earthy and sordid present helps to fuel the narrator’s sense of intense isolation and displacement.  

The narrator also describes various aspects of past Iranian history and culture intruding into his present-day experience. The song of the nightwatchmen, who sing of wine-drinking and the Land of Rey, evoke the culture and setting of pre-Islamic Iran. The reoccurring presence of the Land of Rey, which the narrator sometimes hears about and sometimes even sees from his bedroom windows, suggests that the vestiges of pre-Islamic culture are still haunting the narrator and his present-day life in Tehran.

The idea of the past intruding into the present is also embodied in the retrieval of the ancient jug (See: Symbols & Motifs), which the old man gives to the narrator in Part 1. While the jug, representing the Iranian past, has been buried for centuries, its reappearance implies that the past is only ever hidden, never truly laid to rest. The narrator is thus caught between these two worlds, and is unable to either reconcile them or to comfortably and fully inhabit either Iran’s traditional past or its modernity.

The Decay of Religious Belief

In The Blind Owl, the narrator expresses his disdain toward conservative, traditional religion, regarding the dictates and rituals of the Islamic faith as restrictive and empty. The narrator’s sense of a decay in religious belief thus reflects his increasing isolation and detachment from the world of Islamic Iran.

The narrator is explicit about his lack of interest in traditional Islamic practices. When Nane-joon gives him a prayer book, he says he has no use for it, noting, “none of this has ever had any effect on me: neither mosque, nor the call of the muezzin [call to prayer], nor ablutions and spitting, and bending over and standing upright before an almighty god with absolute power that one has to converse with in Arabic” (53). He even describes religious beliefs as “childish” (54). The narrator thus explicitly sets himself apart from the faith that structures Iranian life and society, rejecting it as something alien and illegitimate in his eyes.

The narrator also associates Islam with the dissatisfactory state of his marriage, which further fuels his sense of isolation. The narrator recounts how, after he and his wife kiss, they are pressured into marriage for the sake of upholding religious dictates surrounding sexual morality. He speculates, “maybe she disliked me for the fact than an akhoond had made her my possession by reciting a few Arabic words in her ears” (38). Instead of regarding his marriage as a personal connection, the narrator instead experiences it as something purely formulaic and centered upon ownership, regarding the religious ceremony as making his wife his “possession” instead of a true companion. In a mode typical of The Blind Owl, this image of an akhoond whispering Arabic words into his wife’s ear then reoccurs in slightly refracted form when the old peddler, a symbol of traditional religion, is having sex with his wife. The narrator describes how, “the impression of the old man’s dirty, rotting, yellow teeth from which Arabic verses pass through were on my wife’s cheek” (65), once more suggesting that a religious element has come between himself and his wife.

The narrator’s tense relationship with Iranian religious beliefs does not resolve itself in the novella. Instead, after his wife’s murder, the narrator believes that he himself has become transformed into the old peddler. This transformation implies that, regardless of his feelings, he is just as unable to escape from Iranian religion as he is from the Iranian past.

Death as an Ideal Eternal State

Throughout The Blind Owl, the narrator longs for death and seeks to approximate it through sleep, smoking opium, and drinking wine. He fantasizes routinely about dying by suicide even as he fears dying. The narrator’s desire for death is rooted in his belief that the material world is fallen, decaying, and corrupted. He contrasts this view of the living world with his belief about death as a state that is incorruptible and eternal.

The narrator’s disgust for the living world is seen most clearly in his opinions on what he terms the “rabble,” his word for other people. He denigrates, “the rabble whose life has stages and a fixed plan, like the seasons of a year” (30), which is to say they are finite and ever-changing rather than being infinite and unchanging, like death. He goes on to declare, “my confined existence in this mirror is more important than the world of the rabble, which has nothing to do with me” (31). The narrator seeks to transcend the living world through isolation and death, taking refuge in the idea that he could escape from the “rabble” that surrounds him.

As part of his disintegration, the narrator describes himself as a kind of living dead who can no longer interact with others. He despairs at this intermediate state and hopes to “partake in the oblivion and peace of death” (54) even as he “fear[s]” it. Before he goes to sleep, he calms himself by thinking of death, which he describes in romantic, lyrical terms: “I truly wished to die and become nonexistent […] The only thing that comforted me was the hope of nothingness after death” (59-60). The narrator valorizes death as something “that rescues us from the falsehoods of life” (61). The narrator thus believes that when he dies, he will no longer be subject to the customs and hypocrisy of the material world and, in particular, Iranian life.

The narrator’s murder of his wife at the novel’s end turns him into someone who both inflicts death and transforms himself into a death-like state. He had previously fantasized about both of them drinking poisoned wine together, but instead, he murders her. However, the final page of the text reveals that the narrator resembles a corpse—he is covered in dirt and blood and surrounded by flies and maggots. This suggests that he has achieved death, but that it is not the idealized, transcendent state he had envisioned before.

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