Snow #4

I'm starting to really like Snow. I can see why Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After Ka's meeting with Blue, he walks outside and thinks that the snowflakes had stopped moving, "as if time itself had stopped." I don't know if this has any significant meaning, but it feels like there is, so I'm still trying to figure it out. It seems like the whole time there is snow, Ka is living in a fantasy world. He comes back to Kars in order to relive his childhood and he mentions fantasies a lot. In his fantasy, he is madly in love with Ipek and she is madly in love with him. He imagines that she is willing to drop everything in order to run away with him to Germany where they will spend the rest of their lives happily married. I think he is being naive. Maybe it's the snow.

Later, not long after Necip and his friends ask Ka questions about religion, he gets an inspiration to write a poem called Snow. I found this very interesting because the newspaper did in fact predict that he would write this poem. That also means that the newspaper will probably be right in him reading the poem at the theater later that evening. The way things are working out makes me feel incredulous. I don't know how any of this is possible, but it seems like there is an air of mystery everywhere in Kars. It adds to the feeling of how the snow is covering the truth and how things are described as a fantasy.

"He had the feeling that simply by watching the snow fall he would be able to bring the poem to its predetermined end. (p. 95)"

I really like this quote from Chapter Ten.  Snow falls during winter time. That symbolizes death and the end of things. So that whole quote has this beautiful symbolic meaning to it.

In Necip's science fiction story, he says "blue snowflakes fall onto the glass roof above them and disappear like planets." Why is it that everyone knows that the snowflakes are blue? I thought snowflakes are white. Or clear, even. I've never heard snow being described as blue. That's why it's a "White Christmas"...

This novel reminds me so much of The Book Thief. By now, I have decided that my previous conjecture about the narrator being Death is incorrect. I will continue to assume that the narrator is simply Ka's dear friend, although he is still unidentified. The narrator of both novels like to tell us things ahead of time. For example, in The Book Thief, Death tells us that Rudy is going to die. Throughout the whole novel, Death says things like "For now, he will survive. But in a few months, Rudy will be..." Something along those lines. So in Snow, the narrator says "With a childishness that amazed Ka, he opened his large green eyes, one of which would be shattered in fifty-one minutes." Based on previous experience, I know that this will happen. However, when I was reading The Book Thief, I did not want to believe Death. I hoped with all my heart that Rudy would live. But he didn't. So the same thing is happening now: I want Necip's eye to be okay even though the narrator keeps telling me that his beautiful eye will be shattered. This disheartens me. But that is what makes these two novels great.

I just got an idea after talking about Necip's ONE eye being shattered. It reminds me of the cyclops and his one eye being stabbed with a spear...or something... by Odysseus.