76 pages • 2 hours read
Steven GallowayThe Cellist of Sarajevo
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Color Gray
In the novel, gray is the color of loss and sorrow. Gray signifies a lack of emotion, sadness, and emptiness. It is not surprising that Galloway uses this color so profusely in a novel about people who are becoming desensitized to war and who are losing their faith in the future..
Gray, in this novel, captures the characters’ feelings of futility in the face of war. Gray—which is neither black nor white—also captures the colorlessness of life during war, life without natural beauty and color. Buildings are bombed out and breaking down. There is a lack of growth and fertility in wartime, so gray captures both the futility and fruitlessness of this time period for Sarajevo.
Significantly, Galloway’s use of gray—a combination of white and black, the colors which respectively symbolize good and evil—suggests the moral ambiguity of war, the difficulty of determining who or what, is right or wrong.
Wildflowers
Wildflowers in this novel represent change, redemption, and rebirth. Sarajevo’s citizens throw wildflowers down for the cellist every day for the 22 days that he plays. The flowers are gifts for the cellist and symbolize the color and life that his music represents and which has renewed their hope in life and the world. They begin to believe that the city can be rebuilt again—that a garden can grow again, that there will be flowers to grow again. Against the gray landscape that Galloway has created in this novel, flowers represent a sudden burst of color and a burst of hope as well.
The Use of Light and Dark—Chiaroscuro
Through close reading, one comes to see how much Galloway has relied on one specific painting technique—chiaroscuro--to create mood and tone in this novel. Chiaroscuro is the use of light and dark in a painting to create mood and effect. If you pay attention, most chapters begin with some reference to light or darkness—the presence of light or the absence of light in this novel are key signals to what is going on with the characters.
Broken Glass
From the moment the mortar hits at the beginning of the novel, the importance of broken glass as a symbol for these character’s broken dreams is made clear. Observing the bomb site, the cellist first sees a “woman’s handbag, soaked in blood and sparkled with broken glass” (xviii). Like the shattered dome of the library that so depresses Kenan, broken glass in this novel comes to underscore the theme of brokenness in this novel. The characters feel physically, mentally, and emotionally broken, much like the wreckage of the city all about them.
Hats
Hats in this novel are not so much protective wear for the head as a symbol of the necessity of hiding to stay alive. The characters wear hats on the street as they duck from sniper fire and, later, when one citizen is shot, Dragan refers to him as the “hatless” man, as a way of saying that he is dead. Hats, therefore, come to symbolize the necessity, in this novel, of hiding.
