The Cellist Of Sarajevo Character Analysis

Steven Galloway shows his strong and weak writing skills in his novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. Kenan is a man on a water journey who experiences unique scenery and adrenaline boosting events while doing so. Arrow is a young woman who ends up getting a very tedious job, protecting a cellist, that the reader learns about while knowing very little about her. Through his strong sense of scenery, poor character description, and his nerve-wracking mood we see the authors valuable and poor choices come through. Throughout the novel Steven Galloway is constantly describing the scenery that is around the characters. This stands out in the third part of the novel when Kenan is remembering the old Sarajevo when the cellist is playing his cello in one of the town parks. As the music flows into Kenan's ears he beings to relax and he thinks about how “the scars of bullets and shrapnel are covered by plaster and paint, and windows reassemble, clarify and sparkle as the sun reflects off glass.” and how “around him people stand up taller, their faces put on weight and colour. Clothes gain lost thread, brighten and smooth out their wrinkles” (Galloway 209). This shows his strong sense of

The readers will notice this throughout the whole novel, but it stands out in the first part of the novel when the author first introduces Arrow; the reader only finds out a few details about what she looks like, the rest is a mystery. She is “a slight young woman with shoulder-length black hair,” and “Her eyes, large, blue and bright, are the only sign of life.” (Galloway 10,11). This is the only time in which Galloway describes what Arrow looks like and because of this the reader can have a hard time putting together an image of what she looks like. This makes it hard to imagine a person in her place in the novel. The author does a better job at describing the characters in other ways