By opening the novel with the dreams of a child, the novelist constructs a question of reality in the reader's mind. The reader, just like the child, must face the unspeakable terrors of waking life. Instead of finding some hopeful story, some diamond in the rough, Marra makes the main character a small child, helpless to change anything about her environment, paranoid and disturbed by the violence of her traumatic life. This novel is therefore a story of human tragedy, and the inexplicable phenomenon of human suffering.
There is nothing in the novel that indicates a change of fortune. They never catch a break. It isn't enough that the Russians abducted Kavaa's father; they also have the city under a decade long siege, and the supplies are dwindling. The same informant that gave Kavaa's father away is likely to inform on Akhmed and Sonja as well. The death and injury from Russian forces is so common, Akhmed gives up on saving people and just starts painting the faces of the dead, trying to preserve them anyway he can.
The surreal quality of the novel is like shell-shock. Even the most hopeful speculation of the most holistic characters are only aspirations for order in the chaos, but the novel ends with the ominous feeling that their prayers won't work.
What is the reader to make of suffering of this kind? This absolute torture at the hands of a totalitarian tyrant is one of literally millions of stories from the 20th century, and any serious student of history will have to come to terms with the human evil of years past, which ultimately is the point of a novel of this kind. The novel simply depicts the horror and invites the reader to try and wrestle with the truth of human evil.
