42 pages • 1 hour read
Khaled HosseiniSea Prayer
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Marwan
Marwan is the only named character of the story, and his life frames the narrative. As a young Muslim boy at the verge of fleeing his home by sea, Marwan is the recipient of a letter currently being written by his father which makes up the text of the story. Exploring the theme of the Failures of Memory, Hosseini uses Marwan’s age to show the progression of time through the story. Since the father excludes concrete details like dates and ages, the reader must focus their attention on Marwan’s age to understand the chronology of the story. This creates a parallel between the reader’s relationship with Marwan and the narrator’s relationship to Marwan: Just as the narrator is singularly focused on Marwan, the reader must be as well.
The illustrations and clues from the text, as well as the significance of the narrator separating the boyhood of Marwan from when he was a toddler, imply that Marwan could be any age around four to eight. This is a departure from the real inspiration for the story, Alan Kurdi, who died at the age of three. By leaving Marwan’s age open to interpretation, the story conveys the themes of Failures of Memory and Connecting to Home Through Nature. Since Hosseini differentiates the Homs of the narrator’s upbringing and the Homs of Marwan’s memories, Marwan’s ambiguous age means it is less clear how much he remembers of the events of Sea Prayer and the extent to which he can connect to his previous home life.
The story is split between the things that Marwan cannot remember and the life that he does. This catastrophic split occurs just at the beginning of memory in early childhood. His innocence during this time of violence and loss speaks to how young he still must be. He is still at the age when his father will say, “[h]old my hand. / Nothing bad will happen” (37), and in childlike faith, Marwan will believe him.
The father begins his story when the he is the same age as present-day Marwan, so Marwan is directly compared to his father. Both characters are attentive and inquisitive. They both notice details about their environment. While the narrator’s childhood memories focus on Connecting to Home Through Nature, Marwan’s environment is ever changing. His father’s poetic lines emphasize Marwan’s adaptable and watchful nature. He says, “[y]ou know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole” (27), implying that Marwan is smart enough to plan and optimistic enough to find fun and recreation among the wreckage. Hosseini employs irony as the narrator’s descriptions are similar to a happy father bragging about his child, but due to the subtext, the compliments only highlight the tragedy of Marwan’s experiences. Marwan, unlike the father’s descriptions of himself, has a practical knowledge beyond his age.
However, the narrative suggests that Marwan is more than just his circumstances. The people who matter to Marwan are the “mothers and sisters and classmates” who “can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams” (29). The way the narrator distances his son from the scale of the loss by omitting the names of those who have died hints at Marwan’s continued naivety. The narrator describes Marwan as “guileless” and directly contrasts Marwan’s honest nature with his father’s “tricks” (39). In this letter, Marwan is never quoted, and being asleep, he doesn’t have the opportunity that his father does to lie.
Narrator / Marwan’s Father
The narrator of this story is unnamed, as are all characters other than his young son, Marwan. The story focuses on this singularly important relationship by framing the entire story as a letter written directly from the narrator and addressed to “[m]y dear Marwan” (5).
The story begins with the narrator’s recollections of childhood growing up on a family farm outside of Homs. The narrator is an adult Muslim man, but the age and appearance of the narrator are unknown excluding what can be interpreted from the illustration of him appearing in the latter half of the book (35). Even in this moment, the book hides the narrator’s face behind his son. By obscuring his face, the reader is shielded from his emotions, just as his son is shown looking over his shoulder instead of directly at him. This image supports the father’s belief that he is tricking his son and thus needs to keep his face from both Marwan and the reader. While everyone is vulnerable to the great forces of the sea, what affects the narrator most is his son’s faith in him. By disappointing his son, the narrator takes on the additional burden of being both responsible and dishonest.
On this same page, the illustrator focuses on the two figures without showing their environment. The isolated figures are a departure from the book’s previous narration and full spread illustrations. This composition uses pale blue background to unite the two into a single image, and both are illustrated using the same colors and splatter. This emphasizes the story’s comparison between the two. Since the illustration of the narrator is cut off at the knees, he is not represented as much larger than Marwan. The two hold almost equal importance on the page, with the larger size of the narrator being balanced out by the inclusion of Marwan’s face in front of his own.
The narrator is afraid of the sea’s indifference. Specifically, his fear is that he is “powerless” to protect Marwan from it. While the pages depicting the beach show the figures of mothers with their children, only Marwan and his father are isolated and on a nearly empty page. This contrasts the image of Marwan as a toddler with his mother (11). While the father is present for that memory, the illustration does not to show him there. Instead, the mother and Marwan are placed in a colorful spread of blooming flowers without him. The irony that the narrator would exclude himself from the narrative as much as possible places him among the other faceless figures shown throughout the story. Even as the text addresses the larger family of grandparents, uncles, and neighbors, they are not illustrated in detail. The difficulty in seeing these characters as individuals adds to the theme of Loss of Identity.
Because of the narrator’s faded identity in the text, Hosseini establishes the narrator’s dedication to Marwan above all others, including himself. The narrator singles out Marwan as different from others about to take this same journey. He describes Marwan as “the most precious [cargo] there ever was” in his prayers (43). This shows a departure from his willingness to include many people in the “we” statements he makes previously, describing those on the boat by writing “we are a flyspeck / in the heaving waters” (43). This suggests that the narrator views his identity as a father as more important than his identity as an individual, adding emotional weight to his prayers for his son’s safety.
While the illustrations omit details of the narrator’s physical appearance, his memories connect him strongly to the natural environment. In contrast to the importance given to the sea, a narrator recalls the creek where he and his brothers showed power over the water by building “a thousand boyhood dams” (13). Here, he is able to exert control over his surroundings and practice Connecting to Home Through Nature.
The narrator’s faith is addressed early on when he remembers “a mosque for us Muslims” (15). Since he is a man of faith, the tone of the narrator’s prayers change in the slight shifts of language. At first, he makes it clear that he has no control over what is about to happen to them, so much so that while Marwan is asleep, the father and many others are awake on the beach waiting to leave. As he says, “all of us impatient for sunrise, / all of us in dread of it” (33). The anxiety of the sea voyage traps them in between hope and fear and keeps them awake. So, when the father makes it clear that he can do is pray, it is up to the reader to infer how much good that will do them on this voyage. The next page specifies that he will “[p]ray God steers the vessel true” (43), a more specific prayer, clarifying that this letter is not just to Marwan but also a prayer going through the narrator's mind. However, the page ends with him changing the direction of the prayer. Instead of praying and addressing God, he says, “I pray the sea knows this” and ends in the Arabic word “Inshallah” (45), meaning God willing and invoking a powerful and recognizable innovation of the Muslim faith.
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By Khaled Hosseini
