42 pages • 1 hour read
Khaled HosseiniSea Prayer
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Silence and Noise
Silence and noise are a repeated motif in the text. People are characterized by silence compared to the noise of their environment. By contrasting silence and noise, the story reflects on the powerlessness of individuals and how they surrender to a larger force.
The story begins with examples of positive, natural noises. The father’s fond memories of boyhood involve waking to the sounds of his grandfather’s farm. Rather than emphasizing the people he remembers, the author describes the sounds of the environment like the animals and wind. These examples show the character Connecting to Home Through Nature. Marwan’s grandmother is represented by the sounds from “the clanking of her cooking pots” (9). This gives the impression of a moment of stillness during which the character does not see the chaos but only hears it. He surrenders to the positive forces of home.
The second half of the book equally isolates the narrator from direct memories of people. The “mothers and sisters and classmates” who can be found in the rubble are seen and not heard (29). When voices are mentioned, Marwan and his father do not hear direct words but instead crying and “worrying in tongues we don’t speak” (33). This motif hence represents isolation in crowded spaces.
Brightness
The dangers of brightness as a motif subverts typical interpretations of light versus dark. For Marwan and his father, bright things offer up the most danger. As the father waits on the beach, the darker moonlight is repeatedly associated with Marwan’s mother. She is on the moonlit beach with them in their memories, and as the father looks at Marwan’s face, it is by the glow of “this three-quarter moon” (37). Counterintuitively, the people on the beach “dread” the sun’s arrival. The arrival of morning and the dangerous sea voyage that awaits them reinforces the lesson the father has taught Marwan: Darkness equals safety. In Chapter 5, the white streaks against the dark sky are not breaks in the darkness but depictions of the bombs the sky is spitting down. The bright section of the page is labeled with the text, “Starvations. Burials” (23).
Brightness represents danger in this text, and nowhere is it clearer than in the blood young Marwan has learned to decode. In the world that Marwan has grown up in, “dark blood is better news than bright” (27). While the watercolor illustrations of the father’s earlier memories are dappled with light and bright colors, the life that Marwan knows is characterized by grey shadows and bright danger. By making this the lesson Marwan has learned, Hosseini highlights the differences between Marwan and his father’s upbringing and the Failures of Memory that the narrator cannot reconcile as he describes life to his young son.
The Boat
The symbol of the boat is one of the most common images in the book, but its diminished role in the text calls attention to the larger forces overwhelming the father. While the boat first appears on Page 39, the sea is referenced and depicted in both the text and the artwork on Page 33. When it is first shown, the sea occupies more than half the page and reduces the figures scattered on the beach. As the story continues, the boat, like the people on it, are depicted as much smaller than the waves that surround them. By the time the text directly addresses the boat, it is smaller than the birds flying through the air and the people are barely a dot on the page. Rather than show the boat as a vehicle or a path to safety, the author uses mechanical, corporate language to talk about it. The boat is called a “vessel” and Marwan is “cargo” (43). This symbol represents the powerlessness that Marwan’s father feels compared to the larger sea. The boat is removed from a position of safety or rescue by keeping its references technical rather than optimistic. Rather than praying that the boat is strong or capable, the narrator appeals to the higher power of God and the sea to have mercy on the boat.
Related Titles
By Khaled Hosseini
