76 pages • 2 hours read
Steven GallowayThe Cellist of Sarajevo
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
The Cellist
The cellist is a young man with a prodigious musical talent— so much so that he was the lead cellist in the now-defunct Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra. In his skillful hands, the already-beautiful symphony he plays becomes especially affecting.
Although Galloway only focuses on the cellists’ character for one short chapter, the prologue, we can discern all kinds of things about the cellists’ character. We can see that he is a wise, thoughtful, and extremely sensitive young man. When we meet him during the prologue, he is still emotionally shattered from the recent bombing of the bread line, and his thoughts are rambling and very sad as well:
Not long ago, the promise of a happy life seemed almost inviolable. Five years ago, at his sister’s wedding, he’d posed for a family photograph, his father’s arm slung behind his neck, fingers grasping his shoulder. It was a firm grip, and to some it would have been painful, but to the cellist it was the opposite. The fingers on his flesh told him that he was loved, that he had always been loved, and that the world was a place where above all else the things that were good would find a way to burrow into you. (xvi)
This passage is particularly important to our understanding of the cellist’s motivations as this feeling he describes—this feeling of hope and comfort--is what he wants to return to Sarajevo’s residents.
The piece he plays is significant, as Albinoni’s Adagio was originally a scrap of sonata found in the ashes of a ruined library in Dresden, during World War II. This fragment was then turned into an adagio by the composer, Albinoni. For the cellist, the music symbolizes hope springing out of the ashes of ruin.
The cellist offers his people the only hope he knows he can provide, the hope that one beautiful adagio can offer them. He hopes it will remind him of the beauty of their former lives
Arrow
Arrow’s character and journey is the one most focused upon in this novel and Galloway spends a lot of time developing her character. Arrow was not always a sniper for the Sarajevo Army—at one time, she was a university student on the target shooting team. When she is first approached by Nermin Filipovic, she refuses his offer to join the army. Ultimately, he convinces her to become a sniper by reminding her that she will be saving lives, not just taking them. This argument, combined with her own appreciation for the beauty and transience of life, convince her that joining the army is the right thing to do. She realizes that the “men on the hills” have taken what makes life essentially worth living from her people, who cannot even have a true life or even death any more.
Arrow becomes a talented and intuitive sniper for her army but later, is able to have a complete revolution of character thanks to what the cellist teaches her. She finally hears his true message – that no one has the right to take the life of another. Galloway signals this transformation when he has her declare, “I am Alisa,” the moment before she is assassinated; her use of her real name suggests her rejection of her identity as Arrow, as a sniper, and her reclamation of her own identity.
Dragan
Dragan is a 64-year-old man. He’s married, with an 18-year-old son who, along with his wife, was able to escape to Italy before the siege formally began.
Dragan’s method for coping with the war has been to retreat into the safety of his own home and within himself, too. He avoids seeing anything or anyone that might remind him of the past. He avoids people because he cannot bear to see his friends, who have been ravaged by suffering and starvation.
Dragan’s journey is one out of isolation and into communion with others; out of fear and into acceptance. He must overcome both his isolation and his fear to achieve any kind of catharsis.
We know he has begun to heal at the end of chapter four, when he hears the cellist play for the last time. Galloway signifies the change in Dragan’s character by having him go out of his way to greet a passerby and in his decision not to leave his country, but, rather, to help to rebuild it.
Kenan
Kenan is a middle aged, married man who lives with his wife and children in an apartment, where they hide from the war-torn world like hostages. Kenan only ventures out into the world every four days to replace their dwindling water supply. He is also kind enough to get water for an elderly and somewhat spirited, woman who lives downstairs.
Kenan will only get water from the cistern under a brewery in a nearby town because he is sure it is clean enough to drink. This means a long and perilous trip, where he is constantly under threat of shelling and sniper fire. However, he braves these trips in order to get for safe water for his wife and children.
Throughout the novel, he often wishes he had the courage he witnesses in others around him. For example, when the brewery where he gets his water is mortared, he can only sit in a dazed, traumatized stupor instead of helping the other wounded about him, as he sees others doing. Instead of tending to the wounded, he returns home immediately.
Kenan has to face his fear if he is to make any kind of moral or emotional progress He will finally achieve this progress after witnessing the beauty and courage of the cellist playing to honor his fallen friends, in spite of the danger to himself. He finally realizes that he has been living like a “ghost” and that “to be a ghost while you’re still alive is the worst thing he can imagine”. Bolstered by a renewed spirit and resolve, Kenan promises to begin living without fear.
