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Abstract

In her article, "A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat's The Blind Owl," Yasamine C. Coulter discusses post-colonial theories of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Jalal ale Ahmad, and relates them to the major themes of Hedayat's novel. For the most part, the fact that the text's narrator is disillusioned with his country's traditional way of life makes him an outsider within his own society. However, he fails to find peace in his other, chosen, mode of being and this implies that he is unable to fully identify with Western traditions, either. It is at this point of the text that Coulter draws a parallel between the narrator's distress and Sadegh Hedayat's personal angst, both of which stem from an inability to reconcile Western and Eastern influences and modes of existence and culture. Moreover, the narrator's inability to completely accept or disregard the notion of metaphysics is a macrocosmic manifestation of his cultural dilemma. Coulter concludes her argumentation with a discussion of how one of perhaps the most important fault lines of post-colonial discourse is very real in present-day Iran, precisely because Iranians still do not agree on how to reclaim their cultural past and assert their own identity in the real context of Western cultural omnipresence.

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