Broken April Literary Elements

Historical fiction

Set in North Albania in the 1930s

Narrator: Omniscient speaker

Point of View: Third-person

Grim, Dark, Tragic, Haunting

The protagonist of the novel is 26-year-old Gjorg Berisha. The antagonist is both the Kryeqyqye family but also the Kanun code that forces the continuation of the blood feuds.

The major conflict of the novel is the blood feud between the Besara and Kryeqyqye families. The novel's protagonist, Gjorg, is not only in conflict with the Kryeqyqye family but also the code of laws, the Kanun, that demands the continuation of the blood feuds.

The climax of the story is when Diana leaves the tower of refuge stunned and her relationship with Bessian worsens.

Throughout the novel, the demise of Bessian and Diana's marriage is foreshadowed. While they end the novel still a couple, it is made clear that she has fallen in love with Gjorg and no longer loves Bessian. Gjorg's death is also frequently foreshadowed, to the point that it is clear that he will die before the novel's end. For example, at the end of the fifth chapter, Kadare describes Gjorg as an "unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short" (166).

Instead of understatement, Kadare frequently uses hyperbole to describe the beliefs and actions of the characters in the novel. For example, Gjorg recalls an experience of "listening to his father who spoke to him of blood. The whole world was stained with it. It shone red upon the snow, pools of it spread and stiffened everywhere" (44). Of course, it is not actually the case that blood is physically staining everywhere; however, Kadare uses this language to express the passion–and sometimes extreme beliefs–of the culture he describes in the novel.

The novel alludes to the traditional justice system in Northern Albania known as the Kanun that established the rules for the conduct of everyday life, as well as for the blood feuds and revenge killings. Throughout the novel, Kadare also makes allusions to the work of artists like Shakespeare and Beethoven, and to philosophers like Karl Marx.

“The long room was in semi-darkness. At first he thought it was empty. Then he made out a fire in one corner. Not much of a fire, and fed with damp wood that gave out more smoke than flame. Some men were waiting in that room. He smelled the odor of the heavy woolen cloth of their cloaks before he could see their forms, sitting on wooden stools or squatting in the corners. Gjorg too huddled in a corner, putting his rifle between his knees. Little by little his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. The acrid smoke gave him a bitter taste in his throat.”

The paradox in the narrative is the perpetual cycle of a blood feud that demands avenging a death with death according to the Code.

In a broad sense, the situations of Gjorg and Diana are placed in parallel to one another: both desire to be freed from the constraints that they are placed in. Whereas Gjorg wants to escape the control of the Kanun law that demands he participate in the blood feud, Diana wants to escape her marriage from Bessian in order to be with Gjorg.

Occasionally, Kadare also includes parallelism at the level of the sentence, for example, when he writes "eternal time, that was no longer his, without days, without seasons, without years..." (209).

The word "blood" is used frequently in the novel as both a metonymy and a synecdoche. In once sense, it refers to families and ancestry. That is, a "blood feud" is a feud between two families. At the same time, "blood" also stands more broadly for the body and for death. To "spill blood" is to injure someone else's body or even to kill them. Elsewhere, blood Is used to signify guilt. For example, when we say that someone has "blood on their hands," we mean to say that they are guilty or responsible for a bad deed. In this way, the term "blood sickness" is used in the novel to signify someone's guilt for their participation in the blood feuds.

Kadare writes vividly of the novel's natural setting, and he often incorporates personification to enhance his descriptions. For example, he writes that "the country looked much the same; mountains raising their heads behind the shoulders of other mountains as if in frozen curiosity" (35).