Abstract

Satyajit Ray, apart from being an esteemed director and novelist was also a prolific short story writer, but, unfortunately, unlike his novels, his short stories are not considered as a part of the Bengali literary canon. Nevertheless, much like his novels, most of his short stories fall under the category of detective fiction, a genre, that he had mastered. However, similar to the short stories available in the Western canon, especially, the American canon, there are some tales in Ray’s repository of short stories that revolve around enigmas and riddles which produce an uncanny effect. The uncanny can be defined as the uneasy feeling, distinguished from horror, generated by the emergence of a familiar thing that had been repressed. The aim of this paper is to locate and interpret the sources of uncanny in Ray’s “Fritz” and “Anukul”.