Our Lives like Snow (Extended Metaphor)
One of the key metaphors that is traced throughout the novel is the symbolic correspondence between human life and snowfall. This similarity is introduced explicitly just after Ka's encounter with Blue, when he runs into Necip and his friends and discusses atheism and Western individualism with them. The group's conversation ends with Mesut asking Ka about what other than divinity can create the magic of snowfall, and in response, Ka turns to the falling snow and thinks to himself:
What am I doing in this world? Ka asked himself. How miserable these snowflakes look from this perspective, how miserable my life is. A man lives his life, and then he falls apart and soon there is nothing left. Ka felt as if half his soul had just abandoned him but still the other half remained; he still had love in him. Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself heart and soul to the melancholy course on which his life was set. His father had a certain smell after shaving, and now this smell came back to him. He thought of his mother making breakfast, her feet aching inside her slippers on the cold kitchen floor; he had a vision of a hairbrush; he remembered his mother giving him sugary pink syrup when he woke up coughing in the night, he felt the spoon in his mouth, and as he gave his mind over to all the other little things that make up a life and realized how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake... (92–93)
Here, we see that there are several key dimensions linking human life to the fall of a snowflake: the brevity of each, when considered from a cosmic perspective; a sense of fate in the motion of each; and the uniqueness of each, a unity in each case produced by a series of small details or impressions. Later on, this symbolic link between snowflakes and human beings will be implemented by Ka himself in the collection of poetry that he writes while in Kars, placing each dimension of his own experiences along a snowflake, with each axis representing a different aspect of his life (i.e., memory, imagination, and reason).
Hair as a Flag (Simile)
After Ka leaves Sheikh Effndi's home, he encounters Necip in a teahouse, and the two discuss not only Necip's literary ambitions, but also his love for Hicran (the alias that he and Fazil have given to Ipek's sister Kadife). In talking about Hicran, Fazil has an idea of her character and history closer to fiction than reality. Even so, when talking about her past, he uses a striking simile:
To tell you the truth, in the beginning she was an infidel—this was because she was under the influence of her atheist father. She was a model in Istanbul; she’d go on television and bare her bottom and flaunt her legs. She came here to do a shampoo commercial for television. In it she was going to be walking along Ahmet Muhtar the Conqueror Avenue—the meanest, dirtiest street in Kars but also the most beautiful. Then when she stopped in front of the camera, she was to swing her magnificent waist-length brown hair like a flag and say, "Even in the filth of the beautiful city of Kars, my hair is still sparkling clean—thanks to Blendax." The commercial was going to be shown everywhere; the whole world would laugh at us. (115–116)
By comparing Kadife's hair to a flag, Necip is here not only setting up the symbolic correspondence between the headscarf as political statement and the flag that is so central to the novel, but also remarking that a woman's hair and body can also be symbolic and political in the same way. This will ring true in the way that Kadife bares her head in Sunay Zaim's second play later on in the novel, and also serves as a key counterpoint to the headscarf as a political object. In the eyes of the novel's men and political figures, representing the modesty and conservatism of Eastern feminism, in a sense, is the headscarf, while the loose hair of a woman corresponds to a Western liberal sensibility. Kadife herself attempts to dismantle this binary, but it is still the prevailing stereotype of the land in Turkey.
An Angry Teapot (Simile)
When the violence first starts during Sunay Zaim's coup, a key moment comes when the audience realizes that the ammunition being fired by the soldiers onstage is live. During this moment, one of the giveaways that a night of destruction and violence has just begun comes in an unlikely place—with the piercing of a stovepipe that has been used to heat the hall: "A strange noise came from the huge German-manufactured Bohemian stove that had been heating the hall for forty-four years; the stovepipe had been pierced and was now spewing smoke like an angry teapot at full boil" (167). This astute simile not only conveys the shrill quality of the stovepipe's leaking noise, but also brings readers a sense that something (e.g., political unrest, the falling snow, religious rivalry, the poverty of Kars) has reached a boiling point, and that whatever follows is an inevitable and unfortunate consequence of this boiling.
Like Whales In Shallow Water (Simile)
After a disastrous dinner with Serdar Bey and Turgut Bey's family, Ipek comes to Ka's room, and the two make love all night. During this fit of passion, however, an insidious simile creeps in:
From time to time he fell asleep and dreamed of summer holidays bathed in heavenly light; he was running free, he was immortal; his plane was about to fall out of the sky but he was eating an apple, an apple would never finish, an apple that would last for all time. Then he would wake to the warm apple aroma of Ipek’s skin. Guided by snow light and the faint yellow glow of the streetlamps, he would press his eyes against hers and try to see into them; when he saw she was awake and silently watching him, it seemed to him they were like two whales basking side by side in shallow water; it was only then he realized that they were holding hands. (330–331)
Though this sequence of images is intensely intimate and romantic, consider that the basking whale image actually belies a far deeper and more ominous meaning. If two whales were to be caught basking in shallow water, they would certainly be close together, but also certainly in danger of beaching and dying. The whale image here thus brings our awareness as readers to the precariousness of Ka and Ipek's love affair, as well as their mutual awareness of this fragility.
A Sentimental Projectionist (Simile)
After Ka is able to negotiate Blue's release in exchange for Kadife's performance in Sunay's play, he is taken captive by Z Demirkol and interrogated as to why he was a mediator acting in favor of an Islamist and suspected terrorist. Ka at first refuses to reveal anything about his most recent meeting with Blue (which has just taken place, and during which Blue told Ka to relay a message of disapproval to Kadife), but a moment comes during which Z Demirkol reveals a key piece of information that changes his mind—as we learn, this information concerns Ipek's romantic past with Blue. However, just before Z Demirkol tells Ka the truth, we get a moment of meta-commentary from Orhan, our narrator: "We have now arrived at the point to which Ka would return again and again over the remaining four years of his life, like a sentimental projectionist who vainly expects a different ending each time he screens the same sad film" (386). This simile, which puts Ka in the role of projectionist (a role he will fall into often, with pornographic films playing in the back of his head while he sleeps with Ipek, and so on), works not only on a literal level but also conveys a great deal about Ka's emotional state. As we learn at the novel's end, it is in this moment that Ka tells Z of Blue's whereabouts and gets Blue killed, a decision that will ultimately lead Ipek to forego returning to Germany with Ka. Knowing in the future that it was this decision that kept him from happiness for his remaining days, Ka returns again and again to this moment helplessly, just as a projectionist is able to set a film in motion but not change its results, time and time again. Here, we see Ka's sincere regret for what he has done, even if it is ultimately hollow and only comes out of the selfish desire to have been happy with Ipek.
