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Harajuku Street Style Interview with Future Japanese Buddhist Monk Rei

“One of the most striking aspects of stories such as The Blind Owl and The Metamorphosis is that nothing is as simple as it looks, and the reader needs to scrutinize and decode every element to comprehend what the author intended to convey in the symbolic world they created. The Blind Owl is no exception and critics have decoded it differently; reading Hedayat as an anarchist, an opponent of religion, in love with the glorious Persian Kingdom before 633 AD, or a melancholic man writing under the effect of wine and opium. Whatever the stimulant was, and regardless of criticism or admiration, the result has turned out magnificent, it traps the readers and coerces them to live in the writer’s world. The reader becomes engrossed in the story and sees no way out than to finish reading.

It is impossible to deny that the dark and disturbing3 theme of the story represents the writer’s feelings and inner world, tired of everyone and everything, trapped in his own body, room, and more astonishingly, in the black eyes of the woman in his very own paintings. Those big black eyes are beautiful, but at the same time, horrifying. He confesses his admiration yet repeatedly complains about the disturbance caused by them – the eyes that look at him ruthlessly – and the only way to get rid of them is to kill their owner: a woman in his paintings in a black dress, black hair, and big black eyes who has come to sleep in his bed, in his gloomy room. His confusion about whether the woman is alive or dead and the uncertainty to revive or kill her indicates Hedayat’s restless nature. The story goes on by getting rid of the corpse, the other dark memories he recalls about his private life, the melancholic world he sees around himself, and other dark, horrible scenes throughout the story. Moreover, throughout the whole story, the reader will not learn the names of the painter, woman, or other characters.

(…)

Furthermore, both protagonists feel betrayed, lonely, and confined. The handful of characters in both novels illustrated the writers’ isolation and constrained lives. Gregor, for one, finds himself in a new stomach-turning body, and his family soon confines him in his room to avoid disturbing the guests. Likewise, his sister betrays him and wishes for his death. Hedayat’s painter also describes his room as dark and gloomy, like a coffin. He laments about being imprisoned by his family members, who have transformed into shadows on the walls and keep staring at him. There are also the woman’s vexing big black eyes, in which “[his] life sunk.” His wife is likewise unfaithful to him. However, the restriction is increasingly apparent in Hedayat’s storyline as the narrator switches from a painter to a gravedigger, a murderer, a dead man, a dying man and an elderly person. The same happens to the other characters, making it much more unsettling and suspenseful to solve the riddle and recognize the characters in the story.