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Prologue, Chapter 5
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Forty Rules of Love, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Spirituality
Connections Across Distance and Time
Appearances vs. Reality
Storytelling and Truth
Summary
Analysis
Shams. An Inn Outside Samarkand, March 1242. Shams narrates a vision that comes to him one evening. He’s out in a windy courtyard and hears someone call out his name. He tries to answer, but finds he can’t, with Shams stuck looking up at the moon. He hears people screaming about how someone killed Shams. He awakes from the vision, as a man near him tells him to stop shouting so much and be quiet. Shams comes to his senses and recognizes that the man telling him to shut up is the innkeeper at the dining area of the inn where he’s staying. The innkeeper says Shams is scaring away the other customers.
Shams’ vision in this passage seems to foreshadow his assassination by Jackal Head. Still, notably, Shams does not let himself become obsessed with this vision and instead snaps back to the present moment when someone wakes him. Although Shams has the extraordinary ability to see visions of the future, he retains his ability to live in the present, reflecting the strength of his spirituality, which emphasizes focusing on the present.
Active
Themes
Servants bring food in, but the innkeeper asks first if Shams has money to pay for food. Shams admits he doesn’t but offers to interpret the innkeeper’s dreams as payment. The innkeeper thinks that dervishes like Shams are crazy and threatens to throw him out. He thinks Shams is misguided to come looking for God at his inn.
The innkeeper is a minor character who represents the typical reaction that people have to Shams. Shams could probably tell the innkeeper valuable things about the future based on his dreams, but the innkeeper just views Shams as eccentric and focuses more on his profit margins.
Active
Themes
A fight breaks out at the other end of the hall, and the innkeeper goes over to break it up and fight the drunken customers himself. Shams has to intervene to stop the innkeeper from killing anyone. The innkeeper claims that sometimes he needs to use violence because God has forgotten common people like him. Shams believes the innkeeper wasn’t always violent and offers to read his palm. Shams does so and sees an image of a pregnant woman killed by Genghis Khan’s army. It’s the innkeeper’s wife, and Shams tries to reassure the innkeeper that she died quickly when rubble fell on her head. The shocked innkeeper is relieved to know she didn’t suffer, as he had always thought. Although he dislikes Shams for telling an unpleasant truth, he lets him stay at the inn.
Active
Themes
