Point of View

Martyr! inhabits quite a few different points of view over the length of its text, but primarily operates with a third-person narrator whose perspective is closely attached to Cyrus' own. Interestingly, most of the variant perspectives in the novel (the most notable of which are told by Roya and Zee) employ a first-person perspective in their narration, representing a significant deviation from the style and tone of the bulk of the text. These varying perspectives allow Akbar to firmly situate Cyrus as the protagonist of his novel while employing first-person narration in an almost testimonial style in order to augment and clarify aspects of the story that escape Cyrus' purview.

Cyrus is undoubtedly the main character of Martyr!, which revolves almost entirely around his development as a young artist and his struggle to overcome the grief and trauma of having lost his mother in a...