Dash Akol, Sadegh Hedayat's enduring short story hero, is not merely a literary character but an arena for ideological battle over identity, heroism, and political memory in contemporary Iran. By employing theoretical approaches from body studies, Foucault's disciplinary power and biopolitics, and theories of dominant and alternative narratives, this article provides a comparative analysis of two conflicting accounts of Dash Akol: Hedayat's dominant narrative and the oral accounts among the people of Shiraz, where Dash Akol lived. The main premise of the article is that the transformation of Dash Akol from a disfigured outlaw in popular narratives to a flawless hero in Hedayat's account was an ideological appropriation in line with the modernist nation-building project in early Pahlavi Iran. This process required the systematic depoliticization of the hero's body—from his wounds and deviant sexual desires to his political death—to make him a "respectable" symbol compatible with the ideals of the emerging national identity. This article shows how Dash Akol's body functions as a cultural text upon which social powers, nationalist norms, and suppressed desires are inscribed. A full understanding of this character requires attention to both dominant and alternative narratives to re-read the silenced history of the subaltern.