Precedents of The Blind Owl

Abstract

Sadeq Hedayat's fictional works may be divided into four groups: romantic nationalism, critical realism, satire and psycho-fiction. The psych-fictions are not quite the same as the traditional psychological fiction, but stories in which the psychology is unplanned and incidental. They all share a macabre atmosphere in which death, suicide and failure are common features. The Blind Owl represents the peak of this group of Hedayat's fictions, since he wrote such stories both before and after it. While the affinity among all of them can be easily observed, two of the earlier stories particularly anticipate The Blind Owl: ‘The Puppet behind the Curtain’ and ‘Three Drops of Blood’. There is, however, a basic difference between The Blind Owl and ‘Three Drops of Blood’, on the one hand, and all the rest of his works–—including ‘The Puppet behind the Curtain’—on the other: those two stories use modernist—more specifically surrealist—techniques, whereas all Hedayat's other works have been written in the critical realist style.