Influenced by the avant-gardism of his time, especially Expressionism and Surrealism, Hedayat in the Blind Owl chooses the horror genre, internal monologue, and a poetic structure to represent the psychology of the narrator. In this genre, the sense of fear and impending violence is often conveyed through the atmosphere of the story. The dominant ambience of the story is enhanced through not only direct description but also, and especially, the rhetorical figures such as simile and metaphor. In this article, I discuss what role these rhetorical techniques play in creating a suspenseful atmosphere of terror and emptiness the Blind Owl. This paper employs a formalist approach.

Keywords: simile, metaphor, The Blind Owl, atmosphere, gothic

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