Code of Honor

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Symbols & Motifs

Siyavash and Rostam

Siyavash and Rostam, two figures from Persian mythology, play a pivotal role in the book. Kamran and Darius read the stories of Rostam and Siyavash when young and are inspired by their tales and heroic feats. Later, these stories become the basis of the code that Darius feeds Kamran after he is captured by Bashira Ansari and her terrorist cell. Siyavash and Rostam, and Rostam in particular, are symbols of heroism, and particularly of Arab heroism. Reflecting on Darius’s appearance when he is discovered in a cave in the Arizona desert, Kamran remarks: “He looks like a crazy old hermit. No, I realized. He looks like Rostam” (223). The integration of these Persian stories into a more typically American tale of counterterrorism is significant in its role in the identity politics of the novel. Through the tales of Siyavash and Rostam, Gratz explores the idea of the Arab-American hero, and in so doing provides a backdrop for the heroic acts of Darius and Kamran.

Monsters

Monsters play a large role in Code of Honor, particularly through characters of Arab-American or Arab descent being called monsters or monstrous. Monsters also appear in the boys’ code of honor, and most directly in the code’s last line, “Kill all monsters.” Who is and is not a monster is a consistent question in the book; Darius could be a monster, and after the videos of Darius are released, many of Kamran’s peers feel that Kamran himself is a monster by proxy. Aaliyah is treated like a monster by her boarding-school peers after 9/11. This idea of being called monstrous becomes a central question in the question of Darius’s innocence or guilt. Kamran wonders, “Had they called him ‘monster’ with their looks and their whispers and their prejudice so often that he had finally decided to become what they said he was?” (67).

Eventually, those who appear monstrous because of racial and ethnic bias are absolved, and the true monsters, who have little in common besides their horrific actions, reveal themselves. In this way, monsters become a symbol not of actual bad behavior, but of biased perceptions of who is and is not evil.

Islam and Islamophobia

Perhaps the most significant theme in the novel is one of Islamophobia, and particularly the biased treatment of Muslim-Americans. For many characters in the book, and especially Kamran’s family’s immediate communities, Islam equates to radicalization and terrorism. Ultimately, this understanding of Islam proves to be too simplistic and biased for the protagonists of the novel, who are able to separate Islam from its radicalized practitioners. At the end of the novel, Darius states, “I’m not going to apologize for being Muslim. And I shouldn't have to just because some terrorists somewhere twist Islam to fit their own awful agenda” (276). If Islam itself is put on trial early in the novel, by the book’s conclusion, the author separates radicalized splinter cells from the general practice of the world’s second-largest religion, while at the same time bringing light to the bias Muslims so often receive in America.

Codes

Code of Honor is named after the brothers’ moral code, but that code is not the only one to exist in the text. Darius and Kamran wrote their moral code together; later, they are bonded by another set of codes—secret messages that connect the boys through memory and shared understanding. Codes become a larger symbol of familial and brotherly bonds in the book; it is important to Kamran that he and Darius live by the same code, and they are connected across great distances by their shared knowledge of Darius’s coded messages. After Kamran believes Darius is a traitor, he relies on his own code to get him through. Ultimately, Darius proves that he still lives by their shared moral code, and that such codes are unbreakable.