Summary
Chapter 37
Orhan continues to explain Ka's philosophy of happiness, saying that he always kept himself from joy for fear that it would be turned into pain eventually; moreover, he tells us, Ka always felt that it was pain and fear that allowed him to feel joy most keenly, for example when Ka was harassed by dogs while playing soccer as a child.
We then return to Ka, who has just returned to the hotel from Sunay's. Ipek joins him in his room, and together they make plans for their future in Germany. Ipek has already begun to pack, and she is taking with her a variety of relics from her childhood, mother, and even her time with Muhtar. Among them is a jade necklace, and Orhan here interjects one more time to say that, four years later, he saw Ipek wearing this same necklace in Kars and was inspired by her great beauty to write about Ka and his time in Kars. Back in the narrative present, Kadife then takes Ipek up to her room and leaves Ka alone. The weather bureau around this time announces the first signs of a thaw, and this of course hints that the roads will be open and that the coup will end soon. The radio also makes an announcement trying to convince people to attend Sunay's staging of The Spanish Tragedy.
After meeting with Colonel Osman, Sunay passes out, so Funda Eser is sent to the Snow Palace Hotel in order to find Kadife. A brief comment is here entered about how Funda Eser's entire career has been spent playing erotic and silly characters, though she puts such roles to great use in her offstage life. Kadife bears her head for Funda, and Funda is shocked by the health and luster of her hair, saying that it will speak for itself and drive the men in the audience mad. Funda then begins to charm Ipek and Kadife, unable to decide which is more beautiful, seeing fury and courage in Kadife and beauty in Ipek. Suddenly, Turgut bursts in and asks if Kadife will bare her head on stage; in response, Funda sets to work charming him and assuring him that Sunay will protect her. In this time period, Ka comes to join them and imagines himself the happiest he has ever been in his life, as part of a jovial and easygoing family. However, this does not last long, and Fazil arrives.
Fazil tells Ka that Blue wants to meet with him one more time, and that Blue has changed his mind about something. Ipek urges him not to go, but Ka decides to go anyway and gets under the tarpaulin of the horse-drawn carriage once more. Here, Orhan interjects to tells us that this is a moment we may be tempted to read into as the moment that changed Ka's fate forever, but he urges us to reject this line of thinking, since he believes that Ka still had many chances after this to make his journey to Kars a success. Returning to the story, we then see Ka get out at an apartment, where Hande opens the door. Hande tells Ka that she refuses to cut herself off from who she truly is, and she says that she shares a cause with Blue. Blue then retrieves Ka and eyes him hatefully before telling him that Kadife can have nothing to do with the play staged that evening. He says that Kadife only agreed to do it in order to free him in the first place, and he tells Ka that he will be responsible if anything happens to her as a result of baring her head. This makes Ka happy, since he feels it makes Blue less confusing and more unequivocally villainous. Blue then gives Ka a letter for Kadife, and he leaves Ka with the barb that, as long as he lives, he will always be imitating Europeans. Ka retorts by saying that, as long as he is happy, he does not care.
Chapter 38
Hande shows Ka out, saying that she will support Kadife regardless of what she decides to do with baring her head on television. Ka is then struck by inspiration and writes another poem, concerned with the relationship between love and hate. Recalling some memories from his youth, Ka reflects on how jealousy can link together hate and love, making one close to those who taunt or hurt them. On his way back to the hotel, Ka then is stopped by some people in an unmarked car. They tell Ka that they will take him back to the hotel, but they eventually kidnap him and take him to meet Z Demirkol. It is at this point that Ka realizes he has fallen into the hands of the special operations team in Kars.
Z Demirkol asks Ka where Blue is and what Sunay has planned for that evening, but Ka refuses to tell him, and another agent who reminds Ka of his Uncle Mahmut interrogates and beats him perfunctorily. Ka, however, reflects later in his journal that he does not mind this beating because he sees it as a necessarily negative component of his larger happiness, and he feels it will cleanse him of some of his guilt while endearing him more to Ipek. Z Demirkol then resumes his role of good cop and compares Ka to Marianna. He tells Ka that, unlike Marianna, he does not know what he wants, and that if Ka publishes Blue's statement, he will contravene his own European ideals and enter into an alliance with an Islamist, all so that Europeans can continue to look down on them.
Z Demirkol then says he will release Ka; however, first he wants to tell Ka something that diligent MIT agents have been able to document in detail. This, Orhan tell us in an interjection, is the place that Ka's destiny was sealed, the turning point after which all of Ka's actions were predetermined to fall into place. The knowledge that Z Demirkol then shares with Ka is shocking—Blue used to keep Ipek as a mistress, cheating with her while being a guest of Muhtar. Only later did Blue eventually turn to Kadife. Even so, Z Demirkol tells Ka, Blue and Ipek have stayed in touch, even talking three times in the past two days alone. He reads Ka transcripts of these calls, in which they call each other their respective true loves, pledge themselves to each other, and more. After telling Ka this, Z Demirkol then offers Ka an escort back to the hotel.
Chapter 39
Ka declines the escort from Z Demirkol, and he returns to the hotel alone. Ipek then comes to Ka's room, where he confronts her about her relationship with Blue. Ipek then explains, saying that she was rescued by Blue from her marriage with Muhtar, which had since grown stale and unexciting. Ipek then let Kadife in on the relationship with Blue in order to free herself from his clutches. Ipek almost entirely convinces Ka that her relationship with Blue was a mistake, buried in the past, but she makes the error of saying, "The truth is, Blue doesn't really love Kadife, he loves me!" (391). Ka tells Ipek that they can never be happy again together, but Ipek tries to convince Ka that things can still work. For both of them, their mixed happiness and sorrow provides a pleasure in its own right.
Ipek continues to bear out a great deal of Ka's accusations to prove to him that she really does want and love him. Ka says that she only wants him to get over Blue, but Ipek denies this. After, since Kadife is gone at the theater with Funda, Ka tells Ipek about Blue's message for her. Ipek tells Ka not to tell any of this to Kadife, so that they can continue to have Sunay's protection and put distance between Kadife and Blue. This makes Ka even more suspicious, and he asks Ipek just how much she loved Blue. She confesses that she loved Blue more than anyone else in her life, and when Ka says that this is probably because she had only been with Muhtar, Ipek agrees and says that, as a Turk, she is not like the European women Ka has been with. Ka asks Ipek what exactly it is about Blue that makes him so lovable, and Ipek tells Ka that he is unlike anyone else, like a child who only wants the best and would never hurt another person. Ipek talking about how lovable Blue is then makes Ka upset, and she holds him. Ka then falls asleep.
They wake, and it is already 7. They are unsure of where to go from this position (i.e., whether someone should leave the room), so Ka has Ipek put on the ice-blue sweater she has been unable to wear in Kars. He is struck by her beauty, and he has her put on the dress Muhtar bought for her as well. Ka feels enraptured with her beauty, and this makes him feel very evil. Turgut then enters, saying that Kadife will be in danger if she performs that evening, since the media's announcements have grown more and more aggressive in the hours leading up to the play. After all, the audience is full of people from the religious high school, and Sunay has spent a great deal of time convincing the people through nationalistic and propagandistic sentiments that he has brought peace to their town. Ipek says that if Turgut is against Kadife perfoming, she will want to do it even more, so she suggests that Ka go instead to convince her.
Ipek then has some words with Ka in private. She has changed her mind and tells Ka to tell Kadife that Blue is in trouble and not to go forward with the play. Apparently, she has realized that her father was right. Ka again questions Ipek's loyalty, and she reassures him that she is bound to him. In order to guarantee that Ipek will not betray Ka while he is at the theater, she even agrees to be locked up in Ka's hotel room while he's gone. Ka tells Ipek all about his visions for their happy future together in Germany, and he also tells her that he's scared he will not see her again. As he reaches the street on his way out, he looks back and sees Ipek watching him like a statue. This is the last time he will ever see Ipek, and this image will return to haunt him over the last 4 years of his life.
Chapter 40
Ka arrives at the National Theater and finds it mostly empty while Kadife and Funda are still rehearsing. Sunay greets Ka, letting on that he knows their time is short and that the roads are about to open again; still, he is determined to put on his play. Kadife then comes over to Ka, and he slips her Blue's letter, which she immediately reads with relish. When Ka tells Kadife that neither Blue nor her father wishes her to go forward with the play, Kadife says that she wants to and has even been told by Sunay that she is under no obligation to stay and perform. Ka then reveals that Ipek told him about her relationship with Blue, and he asks Kadife why she loves Blue so much; Kadife does not reply, however, and Ka leaves the theater in a great deal of pain, jealousy, and remorse. He thinks another poem is on the way, but he ultimately does not produce one. Here, Orhan interjects one more time and tells us that he will cut the chapter short here, since he needs to first tell readers about "The Place Where the World Ends" in order to maximize our enjoyment and understanding of what follows.
Chapter 41
Orhan tells us that "The Place Where the World Ends" is the last poem Ka wrote in Kars, as well as the only one he did not write down while he was in Kars. In letters to Ipek that he wrote but did not send, he asked her to look for it on his behalf at the Border City Television archives, but both times he called it "The Place Where God Does Not Exist." Orhan then calls our attention back to the snowflake he found in Frankfurt that had each poem located on a snowflake along one of six axes. He tells us also that, after leaving Kars, Ka read a number of books on snow, and that one other connection he found between snow and human life is that both are shaped by a variety of unique, external factors. Ka also left a variety of notebooks with commentary on how each poem is assigned to a particular axis, as well as exegeses detailing the divine inspiration for many of these poems. Rather than existing as useless pieces of esoterica, Ka saw such exegeses as active means of reclaiming the poems that he wrote, which he felt he would not be able to understand without some interrogation of his passiveness and poetic receptivity while in Kars. Orhan feels that, at the conclusion of Ka's 4 years back in Frankfurt, he had brought his poetic vision to completion.
Orhan talks to the two exes of Ka's in Frankfurt, but neither of them is able to paint any picture of Ka except as a solitary and childish person, and neither gives Orhan any insight into Ka's poetic enterprises. Rather, Orhan goes on a retracing of Ka's steps on his final reading tour, which takes him all around Germany. Orhan reads parts of his own works, but then breaks off to ask questions about Ka, at which point Orhan discovers a general lack of interest in Ka's work and death. One woman, however, approaches Orhan to say that she recalls Ka reading "The Place Where God Does Not Exist," though he only read four lines of it. Returning back to Frankfurt after this mini-tour, Orhan then realizes that Ka's assassin must have made off with his green notebook, since he had it on him during the last reading. As such, Orhan resolves to visit Kars and retrieve this last poem. Like Ka, he stays in the Snow Palace Hotel and walks the same streets as Ka—though Orhan remarks that his perception of this landscape is not nearly as poetic as Ka's. The mayor of Kars then holds a dinner in Orhan's honor, at which he encounters Ipek for the first time. He understands Ka's love for her and is struck by her beauty, once again reminding us that her beauty is what inspired him to write the book before us.
Orhan remarks that it would have been possible for him to shut out his growing love for Ipek if he really wanted to, but he had an appointment with her the following day at the New Life Pastry Shop to discuss Ka. At this appointment, Ipek tells Orhan that she can only talk about Ka with difficulty, and that Orhan must understand and accept her view of the story in order to keep her happy. Orhan then listens to her, hanging on her every word.
Chapter 42
We are now watching things from Ipek's perspective. After Ka left, Ipek was still convinced that she could learn to love Ka, and she thought about what to pack for her upcoming trip to Germany. After a while of Ka not returning, Ipek begins to worry, so she forces open the room's window and calls for a passerby to go into the hotel and help her out. Turgut releases Ipek from the room, and together they decide to head to the theater to see what is happening. They eventually arrive at the theater, but Ipek worries when she is unable to find either Kadife or Ka. They mention their relationship to the leading lady to a sergeant, and he shows them to a room. There, Kadife appears and says that she plans on performing, since after all the advertising that has been done it is more dangerous to not go on. Turgut is upset that his daughter is taking such a big risk, but Ipek and Kadife get to talking about the issue of Ka's whereabouts. Kadife says that Ka should have been back at the hotel some time ago, and this worries both her and Ipek.
Ipek and Kadife then ask to be left alone to have a word in private. Once alone, they talk about Kadife's certainty that she wants to go on, as much a product of her hatred for Blue as it is her love for him. Ipek asks Kadife whether she thinks she and Ka can be happy together in Germany, and Kadife tells her that they can if she stops telling Ka about her past. Kadife and Ipek both are worried about Ka, however, and Ipek leaves the theater in order to look for Ka. Once they arrive home, however, the army truck that had been shuttling Ka arrives at their house with a letter. The letter is addressed to Turgut, and it contains Ka's room key, to be used to let Ipek out. It also has a note for Ipek, which she reads. The letter says that, after leaving the theater, he was taken into military custody and forced out of town on the first train to Erzurum, where he will wait for her.
Later, Ipek begins to pack for Germany and has no doubt in her mind that she will be leaving Kars with Ka. Since she is about to go to a new, strange place, she sees her home through the eyes of a stranger for the first time and recognizes how much it has been worn down and changed over the years. Just as she is getting ready to leave, however, Fazil arrives at the door. Fazil tells Ipek that Blue and Hande have been killed, and he is sure that someone must have tipped the police off to Blue's location. This makes Ipek decide not to join Ka, since she fears it was him who tipped the police off. Nonetheless, she sends Ka's bag after him, and she agrees to take in Fazil, who has nowhere else to go. Finally, Ipek resolves to go to the theater and tell this news to Kadife herself with her father.
Chapter 43
Sunay decides to change the title of the play to The Tragedy in Kars. As Orhan remarks, based on a tape of the play that he found at the Border City Television Archive, the first half of the play is essentially incomprehensible and decries the backwardness of blood feuds and those who allow themselves to be drawn into them. There are also a series of improvisations, parodies, and soliloquies in the typical style of Sunay and his company. Despite the confusion of the play, those who were present remember distinctly the passion of Sunay's performance, as well as the enthusiasm in his eyes while he acted. Perhaps it was also something in Sunay's flair and the power he had been able to command in the days of the coup. Orhan, too, comments on this feeling that he had while watching the play performed: the idea that all those who watched it were part of the same, fictive we, bound to the theater and its hopeless story. Kadife, however, threatened to snap this trance, and this is why the cameraman filming the play focused on her only when absolutely necessary. She was both a draw in the play, but also a threat to its sanctity and coherence.
Twenty minutes into the play, a hint of what is to come unfolded as Sunay told Kadife onstage that he could not condone suicide. In response, Kadife told Sunay that, in a city where people are killing each other like animals, no one has the right to keep her from doing the same. This, Orhan tells us, is the last line that Blue was able to hear Kadife say before his compound was raided and he was killed. We then return to the theater, where we see that Kadife is beginning to entrance the audience as they learn of her difficult decision to either uncover her head or commit suicide. It is also here that Orhan tells us that Kadife refused to give him her own version of events when he was in Kars. In the silence of the theater that night, Orhan tells us that one could also hear the sound of the first train to leave Kars, the very train that was taking Ka out of the city. At this point, Ipek and her father hear the whistle on their way to the theater. On their way, they see the headline for the next day's paper and, seeing that it mentions Sunay's death onstage, begin to hurry on their way to the theater.
When Ipek and Turgut arrive at the theater, the second act is just beginning. Sunay and Kadife are discussing suicide onstage, and while Sunay suggests that women commit suicide in order to save their pride, Kadife rebuts that women commit suicide in order to show their pride. In other words, Kadife says, a women commits suicide only when she realizes how lonely womanhood is and what it truly means. Put yet another way, women kill themselves in order to gain something, while men kill themselves because they feel they have lost everything. Sunay admires Kadife's courage and cleverness, and he announces to the audience that he wants his own death to be at the hands of such a woman. He also takes out a gun. After this act ends, Ipek and her father then meet with Kadife in her dressing room. While there, Turgut cautions Kadife not to shoot the gun at Sunay, since it may be loaded, and he also tells Kadife that Ipek did not leave yet because she wanted to stay with her family more than she wanted to leave.
Here, however, Ipek tells her sister the truth. She mentions that Blue and Hande were killed in a raid, that Fazil delivered the news, and that she did not go with Ka because she worried that it was Ka who had betrayed Blue. Kadife and Ipek then share sorrow and cry together bitterly. Just then, Colonel Osman enters and offers to let Kadife free. She does not take the offer, however, and decides to go back on stage for a third act. During this act, Kadife announces to Sunay that she is her own person, and that it is her independence that scares people more than her intelligence. She also announces that she is going to bare her head before killing herself. Sunay asks if she is sure that she wants to do it for religious and personal reasons, and Kadife makes clear that she is also going to kill Sunay in order to free the country, her religion, and the nation's women from his oppression. Though the clip is empty, which he takes great care to show the audience, he then says that he will hand his gun to Kadife so that she can shoot him after baring her head. Sunay says that he did everything he did for the fatherland. Kadife then pulls her scarf off, which stupefies everyone in the audience. Kadife asks for Sunay's gun and, when he obliges, she shoots him. Sunay begins to talk about how the people of Kars will never appreciate modern art, but Kadife rushes forward and begins to shoot Sunay four more times. It is unclear to the audience whether this murder is real or not at first, but eventually, it becomes clear that it is real, and two soldiers draw the curtains shut.
Chapter 44
After the curtains close, Z Demirkol and company arrest Kadife "for her own safety," and things start to return to normal (440). The coup is never brought up on television after the city opens up again, and most people only learn of Sunay's death from reading the newspaper the following day. Kadife, for her part, then becomes part of a lengthy trial to determine whether she knew the gun was loaded; eventually, the inspecting colonel concludes that, if Kadife is complicit, then so is all of Kars. After all, they saw the same clip as Kadife and even attended a play after it was explicitly advertised that the lead would be killed. Kadife is thus eventually sentenced to 3 years and 1 month in jail, though she is released after 20 months. Colonel Osman, for his part, is charged and issued a lengthy sentence, but he is also released early on the condition that he not discuss the coup with anyone. The others involved in the coup try to paint themselves out as well-meaning patriots but are still detained, only freed later by general amnesty to join up with MIT or the like. Funda Eser was grief-stricken by her husband's death and denounced everyone who crossed her path, but eventually she became famous later as a voice actress. Finally, Ka was listed as an accomplice in the inspecting colonel's report, but he refused to appear in court twice when summoned.
Turgut and Ipek go often to visit Kadife, and eventually Fazil starts to join them in their visits. Later, Fazil and Kadife are married, and Fazil begins to work for both the Palace of Light Photo Studio and Kars Border Television. Orhan then comments that, after the dinner at the mayor's house, he met with Fazil to discuss the book he was writing about Ka. Fazil tells Orhan that they can find the poem recording at the television studio, and he also asks Orhan whether he wants to paint the people of Kars as poor and pitiable for an outside audience. Orhan says he would never do this, but Fazil remarks that Ka was a good person too who committed the ultimate evil. Later, Orhan reads the science fiction novel Fazil is writing in Necip's name, and praises it. Fazil then agrees to appear in Orhan's novel if only Fazil can speak directly to Orhan's readers, though he does not know yet what he wants to say to the readers.
Orhan then wanders the city and feels like Ka as he repeats many of his patterns and mannerisms. He even meets up with Muhtar, who shows him around the theater and introduces him to Muzaffer Bey (as we have seen in the earlier chapters). He then went to meet up with Ipek, where she relayed the story previously heard to him. Afterwards, she recalls how she really did want to go to Frankfurt with him, only to have these hopes dashed when it became clear in her heart that he had betrayed Blue. She also wonders why Ka never came back for her if he allegedly loved her so much—the only reason could be because he knew and acknowledged his guilt in betraying Blue. Orhan tries to push back on this, but Ipek points out that Orhan is carrying Ka's guilt for him, and he relents.
Later, Orhan goes to meet up with Fazil at the television station, and he watches both the second play and the recitation Ka gave of "The Place Where the World Ends." After this, Fazil reveals that there is another place he wants to show Orhan. They walk to the religious high school together, followed all the while by the charcoal-colored dog from the train station that also followed Ka. After sneaking through, since the old dormitory is condemned, they come to the top floor, where Necip and Fazil used to watch the stars and talk in bed. Through a gap in one of the windows, Fazil then points out a narrow passageway, at the end of which is the Palace of Light Photo Studio. The light of the studio, as Ka saw before, throws light on a tree and seems to set it ablaze, then flickers off and on again. This is, of course, "The Place Where God Does Not Exist," as described by Necip. Later, they pass by Z Dermirkol's old headquarters upon returning to the hotel, and Orhan gives Fazil Necip's love letters to Kadife. Meanwhile, Orhan looks back at the snowflake diagram in Ka's notebook and finds that "The Place Where God Does Not Exist" is on the Memory axis, suggesting that he had actually been there in person. This reveals to Orhan that, after leaving the theater, Ka had really gone to Necip's dorm to see this sight for himself, then gone to Z Demirkol to betray Blue.
Orhan then goes to dinner with Ipek and her family. No one mentions Ka, and Orhan concludes that prison was good for Kadife, as it made her more mature. Later, Ipek shows Orhan Ka's old room, and when Orhan makes a pass at Ipek, she says she no longer has the heart for love. Orhan then takes us the next morning through a series of conclusory stories and details regarding the people from earlier in the novel. For example, he reveals that the person who killed Dr. Yilmaz was a teahouse operator from Tokat who was invited to Kars by Blue. The fireman who sang folk songs during the coup amassed a following and became a television star with a weekly show. Saffet is still working as a detective, and when Orhan reveals that he is in Kars to write about Ka, Saffet punchily tells him that "no one here likes Ka these days" (459). Fazil then spends the rest of the day with Orhan and shows him around the rest of the city, even telling him that Blue's disciples joined up with radical Islamists in Germany (these are the people, Orhan suspects, that killed Ka). Later, as Orhan boards the train out of Kars, he is given some newspapers that mention Ka and a Turgenev book translated by Turgut Bey. Everyone comes to see him off, and Orhan asks Fazil finally what he would like to say to his novel's readers. Fazil replies, "nothing," then goes on to say that he does not want Orhan's readers to believe any of what he has written since "no one could understand us from so far away" (462). Fazil feels that Orhan's readers will see themselves as superior and humanistic to the people of Kars, and Fazil urges them not to do so. Finally, everyone wishes Orhan well, and they even wish his daughter Rüya well. The train then leaves, and Orhan watches the city disappear into the snow.
Analysis
The conclusion of Snow is as well-crafted as it is striking. Here, not only do we see the wrapping up and resolution of our main conflict and thematic interrogations, but we also see many shocking revelations: that Ka is the agent of his own undoing (i.e., when he betrays Blue out of jealousy); that Ipek was and perhaps still is infatuated with Blue; and that Kadife is the agent of Sunay Zaim's death (and, in a way, of ending the coup). These revelations are also made doubly striking because of the narrative device by which they are relayed to us—rather than show us the betrayal and more in real time from the perspective of Ka, who we have seen as a vicarious protagonist throughout the text, we are made to see them through the eyes of both Ipek and Orhan, whose shock at each of these happenings doubles their effect on readers and also concretizes the importance of multiple perspectives. This idea that multiple perspectives must always be considered, even in the most plain and everyday of conflicts, then becomes more or less the ultimate lesson of Pamuk's text.
First, on the point of our narrator, Orhan, who comes into the clearest focus here. As we have already seen, based on details revealed prior to this point (i.e., that our narrator is a novelist who shares a name with the text's author; that he is engaged, like the text's author, in a project called the Museum of Innocence), it is more than likely that our narrator is supposed to literally represent Orhan Pamuk himself. Here, in the form of Rüya, the name of Orhan Pamuk's real daughter, then, we seem to get explicit confirmation of this idea. As we have already explored, this link between real historiography and artistic creation then exposes the contingent and flexible qualities of history, as well as underscores the importance of individual perspective in representing an event or place accurately. Here, again, we have reinforcement of this idea in the form of Fazil, who explicitly weaves the rejection of a single, outside perspective into the text. Where we may have been thinking of Ka (more on this in the next paragraph), or certainly Orhan, as an unbiased or reliable narrator, Fazil reminds us of the fundamental problem of literature that tells the story of another person—there are always the problems of implicit bias on the writer's part and on the readers' parts. As Fazil is keen to remind us, after all, the story of Kars is not just the story of Ka, but rather the story of the people who live there, and our understanding of Ka's narrative is plugged into larger cultural and historical assumptions about Kars's wealth, isolation from the world, and religious background. To fully understand the events told to us in the novel, we must first endeavor to free our mind of such assumptions and get to the true heart of the city's conflicts—the tragedies affecting ordinary men and women, which Ka and Orhan too often force into the background.
Just as Orhan is compromised by Fazil in this conclusory section of the text, so too is Ka by those around him. Where we may have been conditioned to see Ka as a relatively neutral figure in the Kars conflicts prior to this section, we here see that Ka's fixation on Ipek fundamentally renders him unable to work as a mediator and implicates him in the destruction and violence facing the city. Because Ka is the subject of the narrative, we are conditioned to see his aloofness and casual indifference to the goings on in Kars as a creative virtue or, at worst, a quirk of his personality. However, once we see Ka lock Ipek in a room, and once we learn gradually about the horror of his betraying Blue, we start to see that Ka is not as much a victim of fate as we may have thought. His murder, after all, directly flows as a consequence from this betrayal, and so too does his loneliness in the last years of his life. Moreover, once we begin to see Ka as the type of person who would commit such a heinous act, we start to reckon with some of the other things he has done throughout the text that stand out as cruel or callous—cooperating with Sunay, a violent and clearly unhinged jingoist; ignoring the damage of Z Demirkol the night of the coup; feeling ashamed of Ipek's provinciality; and even his love for Ipek in the first place, which transforms in hindsight from a romantic fixation to a strange obsession. Most importantly, however, with the shift in narrative that comes in this part of the novel, we see that Ka's experiences really ought not to be the takeaway of the novel's examination of Kars life; rather, Ka is a pretty insignificant blip in the history of Kars that is often forgotten or looked down upon by the city's denizens. In short, we learn here that Ka is not the hero or victim of the novel, but rather the city of Kars and its people are; the exercise of figuring this out, then, rehumanizes the people of Kars and conditions us to stare unflinchingly at people and things that have been forgotten by the world at large (of which Ka and Orhan are emissaries).
At the center of those things forgotten or overlooked by the mainstream world are feminist values. As seen through the poignant and hard-hitting dialogue Kadife has with Sunay during the second play, the state of women in places like Kars is one of deprivation and disempowerment—something that Funda Eser also mentioned in an earlier scene at the tailor shop. Though women are the rocks that their husbands and families rely on, they are often overlooked and downplayed in service of men's whims. This trend can be seen on a scale as particular as an individual marriage relationship, but it can also be seen on a general, nationwide scale—after all, the question of the headscarf is one that does not really concern men, and yet it is used as an excuse by both secular and religious leaders to initiate further conflict with one another, all while subjugating the women who are already made vulnerable by the issue in the first place. Moreover, this disparity between men and women is so great as to lead to the point where Kadife says that men and women kill themselves for different reasons—men because they have lost everything, and women because they understand the hopelessness of their situation and hope to gain something in the act. Kadife, however, shows us that there is another way out of this disempowered state besides suicide—that is, to challenge and dismantle the material structures that lead to women's oppression in the first place. Though it seems miraculous, this is why the death of both Sunay (who initiates the coup) and Blue (who loves Kadife perhaps unfaithfully) frees her not only to mature, but also to marry Fazil and finally be happy at the novel's end.
So, after all of the surprising twists and turns of Snow, where are we left in the novel's conclusion? First, we are reminded that even the most apolitical art can be made political when considered from a different perspective. Second, we are shown that true liberation relies on individual courage to stand up, as Kadife does, in the face of resistance. Third, we are reminded that one can only be truly happy and fulfilled when considering the material and real well-being of those in their family and community (as Fazil, Ipek, and Turgut do in different ways in the final chapter). Thus, Pamuk's central philosophy at the end of the book seems to be a reminder that nuance and kindness towards the oppressed are the only true way to uplift both one's self and community in the face of conflict. This is why, after all, the text endeavors to convince us that there is no true religious faith to be found in orthodoxy alone, that art can never truly represent reality (though it can influence history and society), and that communities are united not just by religious faith but more fundamentally by the conditions and circumstances that define their lives as unique.
