Opening Scene
The novel opens on a scene conveyed through startling use of imagery. The first words of the book are Makina saying to herself “I’m dead” in response to the apocalyptic scene playing out before her terrified eyes:
“everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by… she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved.”
Mirrors
Mirrors are a recurring bit of imagery throughout the text. Most significantly of the specific instances is this excerpt:
“She looked into the mirrors: in front of her was her back: she looked behind but found only the never-ending front, curving forward, as if inviting her to step through its thresholds. If she crossed them all, eventually, after many bends, she’d reach the right place; but it was a place she didn’t trust.”
The symbolic meaning of the mirror imagery reflects—pardon the pun—upon this dizzying upheaval of perspective in which perspective is distorted as a means of guiding the Makina through the labyrinthine quest toward establishing self-identity.
What is Makina’s Identity?
The quest to arrive at her own definition of self-identity is significant because Makina starts out possessing only an identity conferred upon her by others. The narrative will to a large degree mark the trek forward from this conferment to an awakening that allows her to define herself. Makina’s identity is laid out early in the novel by, of course, an external source:
“You don’t lift other people’s petticoats.
You don’t stop to wonder about other people’s business.
You don’t decide which messages to deliver and which to let rot.
You are the door, not the one who walks through it.”
Snow
Just as mirrors are used as symbolic imagery to suggest the distortion of identity, so does the fragility of snowflakes work as imagery to convey the delicacy of the ability to define the self. Makina’s first encounter with snow is described in a way that deviates from the typical focus on the collective accumulation, instead choosing to zero in on the snowflake of which it has famously if perhaps less than accurately been asserted that no two are alike:
“Makina had never seen snow before and the first thing that struck her as she stopped to watch the weightless crystals raining down was that something was burning. One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world — some countries, some people — could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile.”
