51 pages • 1 hour read
Kaveh AkbarMartyr!
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A 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
Cyrus Shams
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of alcoholism and addiction, death, and racism.
Cyrus is the protagonist of Martyr! His desire to write a book about martyrdom drives the plot forward. Cyrus’s character flaws are a primary focus of the novel; he has a self-centered desire to die as a martyr, copes with his trauma and grief through substance use, and is very frequently ruthless in his judgments of others. Throughout his time communicating with Orkideh at the Brooklyn Museum, these character traits are challenged, forcing him to undergo significant development.
At the novel’s outset, Cyrus is already well on his way to recovery from addiction with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and his sponsor, Gabe, but he is still grappling with the conditions that drove him to addiction in the first place. While sharing with the group at his AA meeting, he says, “I used to piss the bed all the time and try to kill myself. And I don’t piss the bed anymore, at least. So there’s something here, right? Objectively. But I resist it. I feel sad all the time. Angry” (23). His sadness is often self-indulgent, a trait that alienates those who love him. During their argument, Zee tells Cyrus, “You act like you live in this vacuum. Like there’s already this frame hanging around your life” (221), as a reminder to remember that the external factors in his life (including Zee himself) are important.
Even though supporting characters like Zee and Gabe push Cyrus to see past himself, it is not until Cyrus meets Orkideh that he begins to realize how selfish his worldview is. The turning point of his attitude toward life and death comes when he reads Orkideh’s obituary in The New York Times, which places emphasis on the importance of life over the importance of death. When Zee meets him in the park immediately afterward, he thinks, “Sobriety meant Cyrus couldn’t help but see himself, eventually. And it hurt. He was repulsed by what he saw” (318). This recognition of his own character flaws, and of his love for Zee, in the final chapter of the book marks the final shift in his character arc. Having achieved this newfound self-awareness, he and Zee can step off the park bench together into the golden swirl that has opened up beneath them.
Roya Shams/Orkideh
For most of the novel, Roya and Orkideh are presented as separate characters, who are then revealed to be the same person in a climactic moment of revelation. This duality is the defining trait of the character; she is simultaneously Roya (mother of Cyrus, wife of Ali, and long-presumed dead) and Orkideh (a mononymous lesbian artist living in New York). Although it seems impossible that these two identities belong to the same person, this impossibility is a central part of Martyr!
Cyrus, in particular, struggles to reconcile the two halves of his mother, telling Sang that he is fascinated by “[t]he gulf between [his] mother making nothing from her death and this artist in Brooklyn making something. These two opposite Iranian women…except it was the same person” (300). This quote highlights how antithesis is a central aspect of Orkideh’s character and how she embodies the breadth of “Iranian-ness” within one person; both Roya and Orkideh epitomize Iranian femininity for Cyrus in different capacities that blend once the author reveals her identity.
In her own words, Orkideh describes the end of her life as Roya as a death-like experience: “Wherever I go, I carry the grace of having lived after I died” (280). Though she means this in the sense that her government identity, Roya Shams, ended when Leila died carrying her papers, Orkideh also uses her newfound anonymity to completely overhaul her past self. That she chooses the name Orkideh for this new identity—the name originally intended for Cyrus—indicates that her son is the one part of her past life to which she still clings.
While there are several key similarities between Cyrus and Orkideh (their self-loathing, devotion to art, and LGBTQ+ identity to name a few), Orkideh has a life philosophy that directly contradicts Cyrus’s. Where Cyrus is entirely preoccupied with having an extraordinary death, Orkideh insists that her own death is uninteresting. She writes in her own obituary, “There is nothing remarkable about dying this way, but I hope I’ve made something interesting of my living” (317). As Cyrus’s mentor and maternal figure, Orkideh helps Cyrus recognize the errors of his thinking over the course of three short conversations, driving his character development forward.
Zee
Zee is a secondary character and Cyrus’s best friend and lover, who takes on a supportive role during Cyrus’s trip to New York. As a more peripheral figure in the novel, he does not undergo significant character development himself but assists in Cyrus’s development by discouraging him from behaving in self-indulgent ways. When Cyrus tries to convince him that they should work together as medical actors at the hospital, Zee tells Cyrus, “Your brain doesn’t know the difference between acting and living. After all the shit you’ve been through? It can’t be like…good for you” (10). Zee’s constant concern for Cyrus’s mental well-being often goes unnoticed by Cyrus himself.
Zee is also characterized by his ethnic background: half Egyptian and half Polish. Though he faces much of the same racist treatment that Cyrus does as an Iranian, Zee is much affected by it. In a contentious exchange with Cyrus’s ex-girlfriend. Kathleen, in which she sneers at Zee’s foreign-sounding name, Zee shrugs her off: “‘Zbigniew? What is that?’ Zee didn’t hesitate a moment before grinning, saying, ‘Sounds like a sneeze, doesn’t it? I’m Polish Egyptian, it’s from the Polish part. My friends just call me Zee’” (135). This sense of humor, even in the face of hostility, allows him a level of security in his identity that Cyrus struggles to achieve. As Cyrus’s love interest, he balances out many of Cyrus’s character flaws that drive forward conflict in the novel and provides a more positive vision for Cyrus of what life can be like.
When Zee meets Cyrus in Prospect Park at the end of the novel, after his appearance in one of Cyrus’s dreams, he appears to have acquired some of the supernatural qualities of the other dream characters. His arrival corresponds with the chaos that begins to alter the physical world, and he seems to know that the end is coming, telling Cyrus, “It won’t be long now” (322). Though this change is never explained by Akbar, it is a metamorphosis that marks the merging of Cyrus’s real and dream worlds: a conclusion that the author leaves open to interpretation.
Ali Shams
Ali is another secondary character and Cyrus’s father, who dies before the narrative present of the novel. He is characterized by his work at the industrial chicken farm and his determination to see Cyrus safely into adulthood. Cyrus reveres his father as a martyr alongside Roya, hanging pictures of the couple up on the wall alongside images of Joan of Arc and the Tank Man. However, Ali views his own life as a meaningless cycle in the wake of Roya’s death:
Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home. Eat with Cyrus. Put on basketball, put on a movie. Drink. Dreamless sleep. Medicine-deep. Go to work. Find the eggs (111).
This detached, robotic tone characterizes Ali in the chapters written from his perspective. His alcoholism also contributes to this disengaged attitude, and though Cyrus is afraid of alcoholism as a child, it foreshadows how Cyrus will choose to cope with his own negative emotions in adulthood. If Cyrus is similar to his mother in terms of her artistic spirit and drive for meaning, he is connected to his father through their shared experiences with addiction and mental health struggles.
In contrast to Cyrus, however, Ali’s alcoholism is a shameful secret; he drinks gin only at nighttime when he thinks Cyrus is asleep. This secrecy reflects a more traditional relationship to alcohol and substance use than Cyrus’s (Islam forbids the consumption of alcohol). In his dialogue with Rumi, Ali watches the poet drink alcohol and use marijuana with distaste, forgiving him only because of his culturally sacred status. The characters’ contrasting views help demonstrate the ideological shifts from generation to generation within one immigrant family, as Cyrus’s views of alcohol differ from his father’s.
