Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl is one of the most important literary works in Persian language. The central theme of the story is an attempt toward the resolution of the writer/narrator's dualistic experiences of the real versus unreal, the sensual against the spiritual and death as opposed to life. Underlying his problems are sexual fear, association of women with death (a common theme in literature) and disgust affiliated with death/women. Machado de Assis’ Philosopher or Dog? presents an interesting but intriguing main character. Quincas Borba, who denotes not only the eponymous (possibly mad) philosopher whose credo of ``Humanism'' disastrously misleads his disciple Rubio, but also Borbas's dog (and namesake) in which form Rubio believes his mentor's soul is reincarnated. An unreliable narrator presents many complications with the reading. The narrators of The Blind Owl and Philosopher or Dog? are both concerned with relatioships, women, and power.
In The Blind Owl it is important to understand the narrator's symbolism of his perception of the female characters. An in depth study of such symbolism reveals that the narrator is unconsciously treating the women of his creation as blank screens onto which he is casting various
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In reality he is projecting a dread and fear of his own female element. The murdered wife leaves no such traits. Both narrators are ambiguous in their explanations. Quincas Borba lays the groundwork for such a narrative of human striving, but loses sight of or is it interest in?, its ultimate success or failure. The reader is sometimes not aware if what is happening to the characters is real or if it is only a figment of their imagination. Instead of being eaten he dreams of eating the woman, to make her disappear. Much of this discursive crookedness derives not from the arbitrariness of his characters' lot, but from the whimsical courses of the human mind. In Philosopher or Dog? The narrator second-guesses his own storytelling strategies, and by an unstable fictive environment where dogs, who are philosophers coexist with flowers that converse. A scant year ago he was a teacher; now, thanks to Borba, he is a capitalist who can scan the horizon and everywhere encounter "the same feeling of property. The author's writing is peppered with intriguing cultural allusions: Poe, Shakespeare's "Othello," Homer, Mozart, Kant, Dante's "Inferno," and more. Which again indicates the presence of a schizoid element in his mind. Such rejection is mainly due to his own schizoid problem, but it is also magnified by the prevailing attitudes toward women in his native country. "See how God writes straight with crooked lines. Union with a woman will not take him into the path of separateness.
Approximate Word count =
1331
Approximate Pages =
5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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