51 pages • 1 hour read
Kaveh AkbarMartyr!
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Arash as an Angel
Content Warning: This section mentions alcoholism and suicidal ideation.
During the Iran-Iraq War, Cyrus’s uncle Arash enlists in the army and is trained to ride across battlefields filled with dying men dressed as an angel. This job is meant to prevent the dying men from killing themselves, drawing from a hadith in the Quran that relates the story of a soldier who was turned away from heaven for killing himself while he lay dying on the battlefield. As Arash relates it,
The amongness, to be among with an angel means you were right all along, all your wincing and kneeling, your fasting, your scowling, that amongness might send you to Jannah, an angel to send you to Jannah and Riswan with conviction in your heart and not fear of pain, suffering, nothingness, conviction, yes, of seeing an angel in black riding the wind, riding the night, conviction to remain as long as suffering demanded, to not end it, not kill yourself (170).
The religious power of Arash’s mission is undercut, however, by his distinctly haphazard attire. A flashlight is used to make his face glow, and the sword he has been provided with does not accurately match the Quranic descriptions of the angel Gabriel. Arash’s charade is only convincing to the men who are dying and desperate for a confirmation of their faith. In this sense, he represents how faith can defy logic, a concept that Cyrus grapples with throughout the text. In another instance of faith operating without logic, the image of Arash as an angel is what brings Cyrus the truth of his mother’s identity; seeing Orkideh’s Dudusch painting is the clue that helps him figure it out. Once again, despite his angel persona being a façade, Arash operates effectively as one, guiding Cyrus and Orkideh together from afar.
Enuresis
Throughout the novel, Cyrus and Roya involuntarily urinate over the course of the night, wetting their beds. In Roya’s case, she discovers as a child that Arash was in fact framing her, secretly urinating on her bed every night after she went to sleep. For Cyrus, enuresis is associated with his lifelong mental health struggles: First, it happens when he is plagued with night terrors, and then it happens when he falls victim to alcoholism. For both characters, the experience of waking up to a bed covered in their own urine symbolizes a larger lack of control over their own bodies.
As the youngest child and a girl in her household, Roya is at the bottom of the familial hierarchy. When she discovers Arash urinating on her in the middle of the night, it epitomizes the ways she has no control over her own person and exacerbates her existing feelings of bodily shame; Arash does this precisely because it will humiliate her and affect her physical comfort. Similarly, Cyrus’s bouts of enuresis correspond to the moments when he has fully lost control of his own situation. Notably, he wets the hotel bed on the same night Orkideh dies, and he thinks of all the things that he has lost control over: “His best friend was gone. He was in a cold war with his sponsor, with recovery in general. His book—if it could even be called that—was going nowhere” (243). In this way, the physical loss of control over his bladder is a physiological manifestation of the internal loss of control that haunts him.
Cyrus’s Heroes
Personal heroes visit Cyrus throughout the book in the setting of his dreams. These heroes are a vast range of figures, from the cartoon character Lisa Simpson to the professional basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Despite their immense differences, all these characters purport to have a close relationship with Cyrus. Lisa calls herself “Cyrus’s friend,” and Kareem recognizes Beethoven’s manner of speaking as an imitation of Cyrus’s.
This impossible familiarity, made possible through the logic of dreams, epitomizes the parasocial relationship that individuals can form with the figures they revere. Martyrs are one such category of revered figures with whom devotees cultivate an intensely personal relationship. By attempting to turn himself into this kind of exalted figure, Cyrus tries to transport himself to the world of his dreams, such that he can mingle with his heroes.
Each hero represents something specifically important to Cyrus. For example, Kareem represents strong associations with Cyrus’s childhood evenings spent watching basketball with his father. Collectively, the dreams represent the immortal realm to which Cyrus aspires. Akbar emphasizes this realm by its separation from the mundane world; it exists only in the chapters that portray Cyrus’s dreams. In this sense, his “dreams” can be understood both literally and figuratively, denoting his aspirations.
