Surveillance Narrative: The Reversal of the Gaze and the Collapse of the Observer Subject’s Secure Position in Bijan Najdi’s “Hotel Naderi”

Sayyad, Alireza

doi:10.30465/copl.2026.54905.4389

Surveillance Narrative: The Reversal of the Gaze and the Collapse of the Observer Subject’s Secure Position in Bijan Najdi’s “Hotel Naderi”

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Alireza Sayyad

Faculty of Cinema &amp;amp; Theatre, Iran University of Art, Tehran, Iran.

10.30465/copl.2026.54905.4389

Abstract

This article draws on the Foucauldian concept of panoptic surveillance and on theorists who have extended this concept to the domain of narrative in order to examine Bijan Najdi’s short story “Hotel Naderi” through the logic of surveillance and the instability of perceptual position. Its central concern is the narrator’s transformation from an observing subject into an object under observation, and the reflection of this process in the narrative structure. The article argues that surveillance in this story is not merely a thematic element; rather, it penetrates the level of form and shapes point of view, the distribution of information, temporal organization, and the text’s perceptual experience. The analysis proceeds in three stages: first, the narrator occupies the position of a hidden and apparently dominant observer in the restaurant of Hotel Naderi; second, this position is destabilized by the activation of political memory and the return of past repression; and third, in urban space, especially in the shop-window scene, the boundary between observer and observed collapses, and the narrator finds himself exposed to the same gaze he had previously directed at another. The study concludes that “Hotel Naderi” is a notable example of surveillance narrative.

Keywords

Bijan Najdi

Hotel Naderi

Surveillance

Panopticon

Surveillance Narrative

Internalization of Surveillance

Subjects