54 pages • 1 hour read
Orhan PamukSnow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Influence of Mass Media
Mass communication symbolizes the modernization of Kars. The influence that the newspaper, television, and radio have on the people of Kars’s emotions and perceptions of the world shows the mass media’s power.
The television’s role in family life is especially clear in Turgut Bey’s household. However, they are not remarkable or unusual in this regard: Ka notices that most families in Kars spend hours glued to their televisions. When Hande is grieving Teslime’s death, the family tries to distract her with a TV show depicting “two giraffes in slow motion, in a faraway land, perhaps in the middle of Africa” (120). The escapism that the television represents resurfaces when Ka and Fazıl sit at the teahouse after Necip’s death. As Fazıl is crying over his love for Kadife and his fear that he has become an atheist, they see a TV playing in the background and “forget their troubles and [sit] laughing at the antics of the American children” (288). Television allows the people of Kars to forget their present troubles and escape into beautiful, faraway places that are more serene and more peaceful. The flipside of this escapism is alienation, both from one’s own culture and from one’s own life. When İpek and Ka have sex for the first time, Ka mentions that he is excited not by İpek, but by “a pornographic image” (249), having developed an addiction to watching pornography while lonely in Frankfurt.
The influence of mass media also has political implications, as the staging of the coup makes clear. The power of television makes all of reality resemble live theater: The narrator comments that the people watching the play at home wish to be in the audience not to enjoy the play but to see “the television crew in action” (149). Sunay Zaim’s theater company’s performance at the National Theater is broadcast live over the local Kars television station. The live broadcast is key to Sunay Zaim’s plan, as it allows him to terrorize all the citizens of Kars instantaneously; he is not limited to the live audience sitting inside the confines of the theater. Sunay Zaim’s awareness that taking control of Kars involves taking control of its mass media sources extends to print as well. When Ka is upset about an article published in Border City Gazette that accuses Ka of being a Western spy, Serdar Bey, the owner of the Border City Gazette, tells Ka, “If your readers want nothing but lies from you, who in the world is going to sell papers that tell the truth?” (301-02). Serdar Bey expresses the practical aspects of mass media and the power of money to influence what it covers. Ka realizes later that Serdar Bey’s articles are dictations that he takes from Sunay Zaim and that Serdar Bey himself has no control over what he publishes in his newspaper.
Likewise, Z Demirkol’s first goal following the broadcasting of Sunay Zaim’s theatrical coup is to control the communications of the Kars Border Television station and search for a “deep-voiced folksinger to celebrate the heroes of the borderlands” (172). The narrator notes that this is only a real revolution if the radio and TV stations are “broadcasting celebratory folk songs” (172). The mass media is shown to be a powerful tool both for the sharing of education and knowledge as well as for oppression and manipulation.
Love’s Complexity
The novel’s depiction of romantic relationships, familial relationships, and platonic friendships shows the complexities of love and its power to drive people toward irrational actions. Romantic rivalries, jealousy, and the connection between pain and love surface in many of the characters’ relationships.
Ka, as a poet and romantic at heart, falls in love easily; during their walk through the snow, Kadife’s character and intellect impress Ka, who momentarily worries he might fall in love with her instead of İpek. The novel initially appears to contrast Necip’s teenage love for Kadife with the older, more mature love of İpek and Ka, but the idea that teenage love is less meaningful is subverted when Necip asks Ka if Kadife is superficial. It is very important to Necip that she isn’t. Ka mentions that İpek is even more beautiful than Kadife, but Necip doesn’t care about looks; instead, Necip believes that “God’s wisdom” has made him love Kadife. Besides illustrating Necip’s maturity, the sentiment implies that one cannot choose whom one loves. Likewise, one can’t control falling out of love, as İpek’s inability to love Ka after his betrayal of Blue demonstrates.
Painful romantic rivalries, such as the İpek-Blue-Kadife love triangle, are a strong component of the narrative, but love can cause suffering even in the absence of such entanglements. Ka realizes that for him, pain and love have always been equivalent. Ka tells İpek that he is terrified by “how much [she] could hurt” him (330). Both Necip and Ka write love letters that their respective loves never receive. The sadness of Ka’s love letters captures the depths of his love for İpek. He writes, “Sometimes I think it’s not just you I’ve lost, but that I’ve lost everything in the world” (260). These never-received love letters symbolize the tragedy of unexpressed love. Meanwhile, Necip’s love letters eventually make their way into the hands of Fazıl, Kadife’s husband and Necip’s best friend. The narrator, who gives Fazıl the letters, states that he thinks he might have done this because he wants Fazıl to be just as “haunted by the ghost of his lost friend” as the narrator himself is by Ka (418). The episode illustrates the intersections between romantic and platonic love.
Fundamentalism and The Role of Women in Society
The conflicts between Islamist fundamentalist belief and feminism are a major theme. The narrator does not offer a single answer to this topic of conservative religious belief versus feminism; rather, he presents a variety of perspectives to shed light on the topic’s complexity.
One of the first things Ka notices in Kars is the posters that have been plastered everywhere to deter young women from suicide: They state, “Human beings are God’s masterpieces, and suicide is blasphemy” (7). These posters become symbols of the potentially negative effects of approaching the issue of suicide through the lens of sin. The deputy governor comments to Ka that the posters might have had the opposite effect intended: He fears that some of the girls might have been driven to suicide by “the constant lecturing” they received from “their husbands, fathers, preachers, and the state” (14). Like the country at large, the women feel the pull of conflicting impulses: to “modernize” or to preserve their culture.
Sunay Zaim tells Ka that he is taking over Kars to free the city from control of “dangerous fanatics” who will take them back to “the Middle Ages” (203). Ka agrees with Sunay to an extent. He thinks to himself that “if Turkey were taken over by a fundamentalist Islamist government […] his own sister would be unable to go outside without covering her head” (27). The headscarf is one of the primary symbols of this conflict. Sunay calls it a symbol of “ludicrous custom” (307); others see it as a symbol of a woman’s “honor,” with Blue claiming that the headscarf protects women from sexual assault and objectification. For the novel’s women, however, these conversations between men about the headscarf often miss the point or oversimplify the issue. Kadife points out to Ka that though she did not wear the headscarf for most of her life, many of the young women in Kars did: The headscarf is integral to these women’s identities. Hande echoes this when she explains that she cannot function without wearing the headscarf because it is a part of who she is.
Kadife is the most politically involved of all the women in the story. At the Hotel Asia meeting, she “quickly gain[s] the respect” of “others […] unaccustomed to seeing a woman address a political meeting with such confidence” (270). The passage emphasizes the marginalized position of women in politics, but Kadife’s natural leadership garners her respect and admiration despite this. Kadife also threatens to remove her headscarf, and Blue tells her if she does their enemies will see it as a victory. The tensions between Kadife and Blue come to a head over the question of whether she will remove her headscarf onstage. Despite Blue’s death, Kadife still removes her headscarf onstage, symbolizing her agency in determining what is best for herself. It is also symbolically significant that just after she does this, she receives a gun from Sunay Zaim that she shoots, inadvertently killing Sunay and officially ending the coup.
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By Orhan Pamuk
