“A school of salmon swimming upstream”
Harun asserts, “This is no normal story. It’s a story that begins at the end and goes back to the beginning. Yes, like a school of Salmon swimming upstream.” The Salmon’s ironic swimming emphasizes the distinctiveness of Harun’ plot. Harun recounts his brother’s story by deconstructing all the assertions made by the murderer of his brother. Although the murderer’s narrative is popular, it contains discrepancies which Harun seeks to uncover through is nonconventional narration.
The Irony of the Frenchman’s accounts
Harun asserts, “So the Frenchman plays the dead man and goes on and on about how he lost his mother, and then about how he lost his body in the sun, and then about how he lost a girlfriend’s body, and then about how he went to church and discovered that his God had deserted the human body, and then about how he sat up with his mother’s corpse…Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death way from him?” The Frenchman’s accounts are unequivocally ironic; the object of the irony is to obscure his role in Musa’s demise. The irony is intelligently incorporated in the prose which he published to the extent that he persuades the reader. Through Harun’s close reading and deconstruction, the reader identifies the manifest ironies which allude to the Frenchman’s calculating intentions.
The irony of Musa’s resurrection
Harun narrates, “ Every night, my brother Musa, alias Zujj, arises from the Realm of the Dead and pulls my beards and cries, “Of my brother Harun, why did you let this happen? I’m not a sacrificial lamb, damn it, I’m your brother!” Musa’s ironic resurrection accentuates Harun’s unconscious aspiration to tell his brother’s story. He has not annihilated Musa's voice and memoirs from his unconscious. Harun feels that he owes his brother the responsibility of updating the world about his story which is predominantly disregarded.
