54 pages • 1 hour read
Orhan PamukSnow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 41-44Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary: “The Missing Green Notebook”
Four years later, the narrator, Orhan Pamuk, continues searching for the 19 poems Ka wrote in Kars. All he finds are copious personal notes, love letters to İpek, and the snowflake diagram. Ka’s green poetry notebook remains lost, and Orhan concludes that Ka’s murderer stole it. He travels to Kars to find a recording of Ka’s poetry reading at the theater on the night of the coup. Orhan meets with İpek to speak about the events of Ka’s last day in Kars and her relationship with Ka.
Chapter 42 Summary: “From İpek’s Point of View”
Back in the primary timeline, İpek and Turgut Bey go to the theater to try to convince Kadife not to uncover her head. Kadife and İpek realize that no one knows where Ka went after he left the theater, and they begin to worry about Blue. Kadife encourages İpek to go to Germany with Ka.
İpek and Turgut Bey return to the hotel to watch the play on television. İpek receives a message from Ka saying that he will be waiting for her at the train station and that an army vehicle will come by the hotel to pick her up soon. İpek packs her bags. The army vehicle arrives, but before İpek leaves for the train station, Fazıl also appears at the hotel. He tells İpek that Blue and Hande were killed in a raid. İpek decides not to go to the station.
Chapter 43 Summary: “The Final Act”
The play, called The Tragedy in Kars, is disjointed but still entertaining because of Sunay’s acting. While the citizens of Kars are either at the theater or watching the live broadcast, Z Demirkol’s army murders Blue and Hande. Ka is alone on the train back to Frankfurt, devastated that İpek did not come.
While walking past the newspaper office, Turgut Bey sees the headline for the next day’s newspaper, which states that Sunay Zaim will be shot onstage. Turgut Bey and İpek rush to the theater to save Kadife. Between acts, İpek tells Kadife that Blue and Hande are dead. İpek suspects that Ka informed the secret police of Blue’s whereabouts before leaving. Turgut Bey warns Kadife about the newspaper headline, but she goes back onstage. After a dramatic dialogue between her and Sunay, Kadife uncovers her head to a stunned audience. Sunay elaborately shows Kadife and the play’s audience that the gun is not loaded. He hands the gun to Kadife and tells her to shoot. Sunay is killed. Kadife is stunned, exclaiming, “I guess I killed him!” (404).
Chapter 44 Summary: “Four Years Later, in Kars”
Four years later, Orhan is in Kars to uncover the mystery of Ka’s murder and see if he can find his missing poems. Orhan finds out that after the snow thawed, the military took control of Kars and restored order, arresting the people responsible for the coup. 29 people were murdered during the coup’s three days. Kadife served a short prison sentence for Sunay’s murder but is now free; she married Fazıl and they had a child.
Fazıl and Orhan go to the Kars Broadcast Television video archives, and Orhan watches Ka’s performance of “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” (417). They then go to the religious high school, which has been closed for several years. Fazıl shows Orhan the bedroom where he and Necip slept; through the window, Orhan recognizes the landscape that Necip described to Ka and that Ka used in his poem.
Chapters 41-44 Analysis
The symbolic significance of the snowflake emerges in the narrator’s description of Ka’s notebooks and memories. Ka’s writings depict the snowflake as symbolizing the “eternally mysterious uniqueness” of each person (376)—the fundamental unknowability of each person to another. The part that the snowflake diagram plays in the plot underscores this, as it is the position of the poems on the diagram that provides a clue to the narrator about what Ka did on his last day in Kars. This clue allows the narrator to accept the darkness hidden within his beloved friend. The loss of the Kars poems (except for the single poem from the television recording) likewise highlights the prominence of absence throughout the novel and suggests the incompleteness of interpersonal understanding.
However, this does not mean that the attempt to empathize is without value: Instead, the narrator advises doubting one’s assumptions, which Fazıl echoes in his final statement to the narrator. In a different vein, the narrator notes that while Ka’s extensive commentary on his own poems in his journals might appear self-absorbed, Ka saw the poems as gateways to understanding the mysteries of each soul. He felt that the poems he wrote in Kars were divinely inspired rather than the result of conscious effort. The narrator even compares Ka to an “amanuensis,” or a person taking dictation from another. Dictation is in fact a motif throughout the novel: Serdar Bey, the newspaper owner, takes dictation from Sunay Zaim; Ka takes dictation from Blue for the press announcement; and numerous characters take down the words of others and pass them along in messages. However, Ka’s “transcription” of his poems implies the existence of God, or at the very least a force more powerful than human thought. Ka seeks to understand the poems that he took down in Kars because he feels that understanding these poems will allow him to understand himself and his place in the world.
When Fazıl takes Orhan to the top floor of the religious high school to see Necip’s bedroom, Orhan instantly recognizes the landscape from “The Place Where God Does Not Exist.” Through Necip’s bedroom window, there is a view of a “dark and leafless” oleaster illuminated by the broken, flickering red light of a photo studio (417). Fazıl notes that Necip would tell him that he dreamed of “that world [hell] all night long!” (417). Though the real view is a mundane scene of a blinking red light and a tree during winter, Necip’s mind transformed it into a hellish vision that inspired Ka poetically. This revelation is a testament to the power of the imagination and the way that the imagination imbues regular life with meaning and creativity.
Orhan determines that Ka definitely saw the view from Necip’s bedroom window himself because “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” is placed on the “Memory” axis of the snowflake. Since the top floor of the religious boys’ high school is also where Z Demirkol and his cronies waited for Ka to tell them Blue’s hiding place, Orhan finally accepts that Ka informed on Blue. The symbolic significance of the poem’s title is far greater than the simple fear that Necip felt at the creepy image: “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” is also the place where Ka sought vengeance on Blue. This implies that hell is not a literal location (as Necip’s imagination suggested) but rather an emotional condition of hatred. Ka’s hatred of Blue led to the deaths of Blue and Hande and ultimately to his own death at the hands of “several young Islamists” (423). Most importantly, this hatred also led to Ka’s loss of İpek.
There are parallels between the narrator’s experience of Kars four years later and Ka’s visit. The narrator does not intend to be his dead friend’s “shadow,” but he falls in love with İpek with the same swiftness and desperation that Ka did. The narrator’s relationship with İpek is like Ka’s in that his love is unreciprocated, but it differs in that İpek is a changed person. She tells the narrator that she no longer is searching for romantic love. All the characters have dramatically transformed by the end of the narrative.
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