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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Martyr!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Martyrdom and the Meaning of Life
Addiction and Sobriety
Queer Love and Repression
Iranian Identity vs. American Identity
Summary
Analysis
Sunday, 3 July 1988. A woman heads from her home in Tehran to the airport in Bandar Abbas. She has never been on a plane before. Although she isn’t rich, her husband has a pretty good job, and their family is surviving better than many in Iran at this time. The woman boards the plane and listens to the safety instructions. Around the country, after the Revolution, statues of the shahs have been torn down and replaced by statues of the ayatollahs. The woman plans to leave for good. She tries not to think of what she’s leaving behind and to convince herself that the people in her life can survive without her.
The Iranian revolution, which happened about nine years before this passage, is important background for the events of the novel. The woman on the plane, who seems to be Roya, considers how the statues of the shahs (leaders in the old regime) are being replaced by statues of ayatollahs (leaders in the new regime), suggesting that the changes from the revolution are not as significant as promised, just replacing one type of statue with another.
Themes
