He knows that his former classmate, Ipek, lives with her father and sister in the hotel. Leaving the café, Ka returns to the Snow Palace Hotel in a mix of excited and dreadful feelings.

It is as if the snow that has covered the failing city has also blanketed its inhabitants and places in a haze.

Additionally, Ka thinks that he sees a former member of the militant left in the café, but he notices that the man has been somewhat obscured. Later, at the Green Pastures Café, he runs into these people again and realizes that they are the roaming theater troupe of Sunay Zaim, someone Ka had seen before in the 1970s. Ka then goes to his room at the Snow Palace Hotel and consistently runs into some familiar faces from the bus. Campaign slogans are also strung up above every street, indicating an upcoming election. The girls had been banned from wearing their headscarves by the secular government, and many see this as the reason they took their lives, so the media in Istanbul has been keen to report on the incidents.Īrriving in Kars, Ka emerges from the bus to see that the city is much 'poorer and sadder' than he recalled (7). They talk about the fact that the mayor of Kars had been murdered, and that Ka is a journalist sent to Kars in order to report on the recent suicides of many religious girls. Ka falls asleep on his neighbor on the bus, and when he wakes, strikes up a conversation with him. He only thinks of poetry, and is a deeply melancholic figure. Ka spent the last twelve years in exile in Frankfurt, though he was never political. Here, the narrator interjects, telling us that he is an old friend of Ka's, and that he is retelling this story from a future point (i.e., that he has knowledge of everything that will befall Ka in Kars). To Ka, snow is a symbol of childhood innocence and purity, and he hopes that this picture of his childhood will help him fit in at Kars. While he sits, he contemplates the silence of the snow around him and reflects on the fact that his coat, which he purchased in Frankfurt, furnishes him with both a sense of security and marks him an outsider in this particularly provincial area. The novel opens with our protagonist, a man named Ka (his initials his actual name is Kerim Alakusoglu) on the bus from Erzurum to Kars.

Snow by orhan pamuk analysis