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Exit West Essay

Decent Essays

In the unnamed city, two lovers dream about life beyond the war that ceaselessly swallows their daily lives. Mohsin Hamid accentuates the prevalent and convoluted escape routes of the city which taunt its viewers with uncertainty in his book Exit West. Saeed, an innocent boy meets Nadia, a peculiar girl with harsh opinions of the revolutionizing world they have the opportunity of experiencing simultaneously. Together, they imagine a life outside their city’s sky high boundaries, but are met with barriers physically closer to home. Their door frames are not just door frames and their windows panes are not just window panes. Instead, they are structures that support the altering realities that have different connotations to those who seek refuge, …show more content…

It was likely that death would ensue an inevitable blast, being that people could “bleed out after being lacerated by shards of flying glass”. With a violent war comes an equally violent death. Considering “windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire”, almost all windows could be broken in an instant due to an army general’s single command. When all the glass is broken, so is the skin of innocent civilians. During daylight, a window reflects the light which makes it difficult to see through, but soldiers are “flagged” to shoot regardless of what’s inside. In addition to the fragile glass, “the pane of a window could itself become shrapnel so easily, shattered by a nearby blast”, showcasing that along with glass, the support structures of windows double as an enemy because it has the potential to “lacerate”. Because windows are delineated as “borders through which death was possibly most likely to come” it is implied that people tried to overcome them. An observative rather than statistical tone conveys that death was typical and unaccounted for since it happened so often. Windows allowed its surroundings a way out, but through injury and

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