Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Narrative Exhaustion

Sadeq Hedayat is a deconstructionist artist-thinker who had created his own style in his writing. One can venture to say that his The Blind Owl has been criticized more than any other Iranian literary work in more than half a century ago and still critics reveal some fresh aspects of this masterpiece. Critics have analyzed surrealistic, symbolic, existentialist, nationalistic, expressionistic and metaphysical dimensions of this work. From the lens of comparative literature, a lot has been written on the influences of Schopenhauer, Sartre, Maupassant, Nerval and Kafka among others on Hedayat both structurally and thematically. In this research, the undeniable influences of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves on The Blind Owl and their undiscovered similarities are scrutinized. Furthermore, inter-textual aspects of the two mentioned masterpieces are analyzed thematically and in this respect one of the major themes of The Waves, that is, narrative exhaustion, is analyzed and its resonance in The Blind Owl is traced. Through textual comparison, it is shown that how some of The Blind Owl’s sentences have dazzling similarities with some key phrases and sentences of The Waves.