On the ending of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

(Obviously, this is going to have spoilers. Go read the book– it is very good– and come back).

As I first read the tender, surreal ending of Cyrus' narrative, I admit that I was gripped by an overwhelming sense of doom. It has the flavor of the last hallucinations of a dying man, and (on Reddit at least) it is clear that a large fraction of readers really do take it as Cyrus' literal death. However, after finishing the remainder and sitting with it, I think that this is almost certainly wrong.

Cyrus' final epiphany is foreshadowed by two prior "miracles." First, the very opening scene, in which a maybe-sign from God in a flicker of a lightbulb gives him the push to become sober. Second, in Roya's first kiss with Leila, which it strongly parallels (both Roya and Cyrus are even said to push back the curls of their respective lovers). Both of these epiphanies are, of course, not an end but a beginning. Meanwhile, death is never shown to have any element out of the ordinary. Leila's last moments in her flight are deliberately, tragically, mundane. Orkideh's death is off-stage, so we don't get direct access to what she might have been experiencing, but it is presented as, if anything, reneging on her attempt through Death-Speak to give her own death meaning. As Cyrus himself says, upon hearing of her fate his preconceptions about a meaningful death have been swept cleanly aside in one motion. He has been robbed, at once, both of his mother Roya's meaningless death and of his mother Orkideh's meaningful one.

By the time Cyrus is sitting alone on his park bench, the central premise of his Martyr project has been thoroughly discredited (and we can infer, based on its presentation as just as Word file, that it will not continue beyond this point). Small wonder that he is in a place of absolute surrender, a spiritual rock bottom. Ironically, though, this is exactly the state required to be receptive to a miracle. His arrives in the form of Zee, with his curls and his Crocs. Now, finally, Cyrus is ready not to die, but to finally live.

The coda reaffirms this focus on life by showing an everyday scene from Orkideh's life with Linh and her family. To me, placing her end here suggests that this, rather than her final show, was her true legacy. Then, the closing epitaph makes things fully explicit: death is coming, but now is time to live.

Why do we assume that the surreality of the ending means that Cyrus is dying? In part because we, like Cyrus, are infected with an assumption that such a heightened reality can only happen as the brain is shutting down. We also, perhaps, can't imagine that life could just continue on after such a departure from the everyday. But Martyr! from its opening lines challenges this mentality. To buy into it is to accept that a miracle can be the beginning of a life, rather than the end.