Exit West

The magical doors through which Saeed and Nadia go are hard to find at first and seem like either wishful rumors or euphemisms for smuggling. Their first experience of going through a door—from their own country to Mykonos—is likened both to dying and to being born: “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it” (98). The doors become more commonplace as the novel goes on, however, so that they are eventually known not only to an underground network but to government officials as well. By the time that Saeed and Nadia are in London, the existence of the doors is acknowledged—although grudgingly—as a new reality: “Perhaps [government officials] had grasped that the doors would not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist” (164).

The passage of the doors also changes over the course of the novel, becoming more flexible and less arduous. At the beginning of the novel, Saeed and Nadia understand that they cannot go back through the doors, or they will risk death at the hands of the militants in their country, who know about the doors’ existence.