Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Allameh Tabataba’i University
2 Persian Language and Literature, Allameh Tabataba’i University
Abstract
This article presents a character-centered phenomenological critique of The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat. The study reconstructs the narrator’s existential situation as a mode of Being-in-the-world and examines whether this condition approaches Heideggerian authenticity. Ultimately, the analysis seeks to draw closer to the narrator’s lifeworld as it appears to him. This objective is pursued on three levels: (1) reconstructing the narrator’s experience of Being-in-the-world; (2) elucidating the narrator’s temporality in relation to the structure of care; and (3) examining the relationship between this temporality and the possibility of death.The findings indicate that the narrator’s world in The Blind Owl is fragmented and devoid of a meaningful network of relations. Consequently, the narrator, as a Dasein, exists in an inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world. The disruption of the narrative structure likewise reflects a disturbance in Dasein’s temporality, wherein the past dominates the present and the possibility of openness toward the future is foreclosed. Moreover, the persistent presence of death and anxiety throughout the text shapes the narrator’s existential horizon; however, this confrontation does not culminate in the realization of authentic Dasein. Accordingly, The Blind Owl may be interpreted as a literary representation of the crisis of Dasein in an inauthentic condition.Rather than adopting author-centered or reader-centered approaches, this study opens a new path in phenomenological criticism. It is grounded neither in reception theory nor in the phenomenology of the author; instead, it places the phenomenology of the novel character’s lifeworld at the center of its analytical framework
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