Snow

In these chapters, the relationship between Necip and Ka deepens and the parallels between them become clearer. Necip remarks that he and Ka are the same person, only separated by 20 years. He asks Ka what his future holds, and Ka predicts that Necip will lose his faith in God slowly. The dynamic between Ka and Necip also reverses: Rather than Ka being the mentor to Necip, Necip becomes the wiser one. When Ka says that “life makes us unhappy” (140), Necip responds, “[W]e do that to ourselves” (140). The restroom scene continues the reversals, contrasting Necip’s doubts about God with Ka’s burgeoning faith. The final moment the two share punctuates this inversion of roles when Necip kisses Ka “like a child on both cheeks” (143).

More background information about the narrator emerges, and these interjections begin to hint at the narrator’s greater importance to the story later. He mentions that he discussed poetry with Ka when they were at school. The narrator uses allusions to Western literature and poetry to develop and foreshadow events. The allusion the narrator makes to the “the man from Porlock” highlights Z Demirkol’s role as one of the story’s purest “villains” (143). In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the “man from Porlock” interrupts Coleridge’s moment of inspiration and causes him to forget the rest of the poem he just dreamed. Similarly, Ka ends up forgetting his own poem due to an interruption by Z Demirkol, one of the violent revolutionaries who staged the coup with Sunay Zaim. This chance encounter will have resounding implications later, as Z Demirkol ends up playing a significant role in the death of Blue and the failure of Ka and İpek’s relationship.

The role of poetry in Ka’s life becomes more apparent. While everyone else is in a state of fear during the coup, he writes a poem about childhood memories of coups and holiday meals. Ka wanders the streets of Kars despite the danger around him because he is so inspired by the city’s beautiful appearance when it is covered in snow. Poetry allows Ka to detach from his present circumstances, and throughout the play he is preoccupied with remembering the poem he recited onstage. However, poetry is connected to death as much as to vitality and love: The narrator foreshadows Ka’s death when he states that the recording of him reading “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” is the final image of his “friend of twenty-seven years” (145).

The response to Funda Eser’s performance encompasses confusion, violence, and anger: Boys from the religious school heckle her, audience members laugh at her, and she is taunted mercilessly. Turgut Bey tells Ka that Funda’s burning of her headscarf onstage terrified men who supposedly supported women removing their headscarves. When she removes the scarf, a teacher claps, but the narrator notes that the teacher is not clapping for political reasons but simply out of “dizzy admiration” for Funda’s neck and arms (148). The objectification of Funda reflects the painful situation that women in Kars find themselves in as their bodies become political symbols of either purity or impurity. Even Funda Eser’s own husband is using her for his political agenda; the novel never clarifies her true views on politics and the nature of her art.

The dramatic events during Sunay’s coup capture the relationship between politics and theater. Sunay’s history of performing as revolutionaries (Che Guevara, Robespierre) provides an example of life imitating art. The statue of Atatürk that Ka encounters on his walk back to the hotel after the coup symbolizes the history of Kars—specifically, the time when the Turks of Kars established an independent state. Sunay’s self-conscious choice to model himself and his coup after this historical legacy demonstrates his egocentrism. Sunay views himself as bringing freedom to Kars, but all he brings is violence and disorder.