I mean, your brain doesn’t know the difference between acting and living. After all the shit you’ve been through? It can’t be like…good for you. In your brain stem.
-- Zee (Chapters 1-6)

Importance: The role of acting and performance in the process of daily life is one that Akbar critiques throughout the novel, and Zee's particular framing of this as an unhealthy way of living functions as a point of entry to the novel's broader view of this subject. Both Cyrus and his uncle, Arash, spend their days "acting" in a very literal sense; Cyrus pretends to be various terminally ill patients at the university hospital, while Arash spends his young adulthood wandering battlefields dressed as an angel in order to placate the fallen men there. By presenting these extreme examples of performance in daily life, Akbar thrusts the small performances of life into relief, critiquing the idea that people...