inability to express: a psychoanalytic reading of the story of “three drops of blood”
چکیده(به انگلیسی؛ چکیدهی فارسی در دسترس نیست)
“three drops of blood” is among sadeq hedayat’s best-known stories and has captured both the general attention of many interested readers of literary fiction as well as the particular attention of numerous literary scholars and critics. the narrator-protagonist of the story, who has been hospitalised at a mental hospital, describes the other patients and explains a traumatic event in his past life, but his account is all but organised and coherent. it is argued in the present article that the lack of logical organisation in the narrative reveals a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the protagonist’s psyche. psychoanalysis provides literary critics with the most suitable tools (concepts and methodology) to explore this conflict. employing some of the most important concepts of the psychoanalytic theory (including “resistance”, “displacement”, “impulse”, “drives”, “parapraxis”, “identification”, “trauma”, “obsession”, etc.) and adopting a psychoanalytic method (analysis of the “manifest content” of the story uncover its “latent content”), i examine the details of the text in order to shed light on the protagonist’s unconscious motives and phobias and reveal the untold story which, due to the pressure of unconscious inhibitions, has not been expressed in the narrator’s discourse. making no attempt to psychoanalyse sadeq hedayat himself, i stress the distinction between the identities of the writer and the protagonist of the story and argue that the psychoanalytical approaches concentrating on the author have caused many misunderstandings and undesirable reactions as well as hindrances to advancing literary studies. the article ends with some suggestions as to how this influential story could be further studied psychoanalytically, suggestions which substitute the text-oriented arguments of the present article with a reader-response criticism in order to provide a context for the psychoanalytical examination of the reasons behind the appeal of this story to its readers in the patriarchal culture of the iranian society.