The Cellist Of Sarajevo Character Analysis

In the novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, the author Steven Galloway explores the power of music and its ability to provide people with an escape from reality during the Siege of Sarajevo. A man, who was once the principal cellist in the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, plays Albinoni’s Adagio with his cello in the streets of Sarajevo for twenty-two consecutive days at 4:00 pm as war wages around him. The cellist does this to commemorate the deaths of twenty-two citizens who were killed by the mortar attacks on the Sarajevo Opera Hall while waiting to buy bread. Albinoni’s Adagio, which was recreated from four bars of a sonata’s bass line found in the rubble of the firebombed Dresden Music Library in Germany in 1945, represents that something can

Arrow is a young woman chosen from the university’s target shooting team to be a sniper in the Sarajevo defence army and is assigned to protect the cellist. The cellist’s music reminds her of her determination to remain emotionally alive and her resolve to act independently, “[s]he would not let the men on the hills decide when she went below the ground. If she were to go underground it would be because she decided to or because they killed her. But she wasn’t going to do their work for them. She wasn’t going to live in a grave” (142). Arrow will not let the men on the hills, the enemy armies, oppress her by taking away her freedom to act independently. She is determined to remain physically, but most importantly, emotionally alive because life in a grave is worthless. Without emotion, one does not truly live. The cellist allows citizens to remain united with their emotions amidst trying situations, which is why Arrow is determined to keep the cellist, the symbol of hope, alive in Sarajevo. As long as citizens are emotionally alive, the men on the hills will never win the war and they will eventually re-experience Sarajevo as a beautiful, peaceful city. Like Arrow, Dragan realizes that he is determined to remain emotionally alive and be free from oppression after he talks to Emina, a friend of his wife, about the cellist’s music. Dragan decides that “[h]e’s going to cross. He’s not going to let the men on the hills stop him. These are his streets, and he’ll walk them as he sees fit,” (248) because “[i]f he doesn’t run, then he’s alive again” (248). Running across a street displays fear of dying and allows the men on the hills to control the population. However, the cellist’s music inspired Dragan to walk the streets to display confidence and pride in himself and his city, and show the men on the hills that