Meeting Firdaus
Based on how Saadawi describes the psychologist’s first meeting with Firdaus, it’s clear that Firdaus has a celebrity-like status. When the prison warden comes to get the psychologist for her meeting, “[the prison warden’s] eyes and face reflected a violent emotion” (Saadawi 29). The prison warden is so excited that the psychologist thinks the President of Egypt wouldn’t elicit such a response from her as Firdaus has. When the psychologist meets Firdaus herself, she also has a powerful reaction. Her heart starts racing, she walks effortlessly as if her body was weightless, and she compares the meeting to when she met her first love (30). Furthermore, when she enters Firdaus’s cell, she is so taken with Firdaus’s face and demeanor that her senses of sound and hearing become muted. The ground is cold, but she doesn’t feel it’s chill, and Firdaus’s voice floats towards her as if she’s in a dream. All of these details create an image of a woman who defies logical feelings and actions.
Firdaus’s Father Eating
Firdaus’s father is the first male figure in her life to mistreat and abuse her. When his wife cooks, he frequently devours the food and leaves nothing for his wife or children. When Firdaus tells the psychologist about her father’s eating habits, she uses loosely repetitive sentences. She compares his mouth to a camel’s, reducing her father's status to that of an animal. His upper jaw clamps up and down and makes a loud grinding noise as if it were hinged, and his tongue is described as having a mind of its own. By describing her father’s eating habits this way, Firdaus paints a picture of a mindless, sloppy, and selfish man.
Eyes
As one of the major themes in Saadawi’s book, eyes are given much attention throughout Woman at Point Zero. The eyes of several key characters are described and analyzed in detail. For example, the light in Iqbal’s eyes is described as being magical (Saadawi 68), whereas Bayoumi’s eyes give Firdaus a cold shiver of death (106). Juxtaposing these descriptions reveals much about these two characters and Firdaus’s relationships with them.
Killing Marzouk
The moment Firdaus kills Marzouk is the climax of the novel. It’s the moment when all the feelings of rage and disgust Firdaus has been accumulating towards men reach a boiling point. It’s also the moment that Firdaus loses the fear that had been within her all this time. As such, Saadawi painstakingly illustrates this moment using various action verbs. Words like “thrust,” “buried,” “plunged,” and “stabbed” help create a vivid tableau in the reader’s mind of how the murder played out (Saadawi 191). Saadawi follows this up with descriptions of Marzouk’s eyes and Firdaus’s astonishment as she kills him to further stress how incredible this event is.
