The narrator asserts that Ove lived his life in black and white before he met Sonja. After meeting her, she brought color into his world by adding love and life to his existence. In this way, color comes to represent love, life, and the connection Ove has to Sonja. After her death, the only color Ove sees are the pink flowers he brings to her grave every week. They function as a reminder of the life and vivacity that Ove once experienced, though they die and don't last. Nasanin's drawings of Ove, on the other hand, are done in riotous color. When Ove agrees to accept Nasanin and her family into his life and puts her drawings up on his fridge, he regains the color and love in his life.
Color (Pink) Quotes in A Man Called Ove
But Ove isn't bloody arguing. He just thinks right is right. Is that such an unreasonable attitude to life?
He was a man of black and white.
And she was color. All the color he had.
And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it were made in grayscale.
When she says that last bit she points at a figure in the middle of the drawing. Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple.
"You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color," says Parvaneh.
Color (Pink) Symbol Timeline in A Man Called Ove
