Martyr!

Content Warning: This section includes discussions of death and racism and mentions suicide.

“Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?”

This long string of rhetorical questions, both cynical and theologically complex, helps establish some of Cyrus’s key character traits. Even as he struggles in the depths of addiction, he asks himself unanswerable questions that sit at the heart of the novel. As such, this passage establishes key themes such as Modern Martyrdom as Performativity and the Iranian American Experience.

“Her impeccable posture gave her a boarding-school air, New England royalty. Cyrus reflexively hated her. That Yankee patrician veneer.”

Cyrus’s arrogance, a key component of his self-image as a martyr, is on full display when he instinctively decides to hate a medical student due to her appearance, which Cyrus deems elite. His perception of her in firmly American cultural terms helps establish the American part of his Iranian American identity.

“They were the same thing, talking to God and talking to my dead mom.”

Here, Cyrus engages in a false equivalence fallacy, likening Roya to God. The deification of his deceased mother is the same process that turns mundane people into martyr saints, suggesting that even as a child, Cyrus was drawn to concepts of martyrdom.