The line, “it was an ordinary inn, like all the others in the mountain districts, with no signboard…”(36), shows how places are homogenized and appear the same. The ambiguity of the places Gjorg travels to applies to the anonymity and ‘facelessness’ of the inhabitants of Rrafsh. The Kanun runs almost all aspects of a person’s life in the Rrafsh leading to an effacement of identity and individuality of the people in the Rrafsh. As men are fated to follow the endless cycle of the blood feud, personality is futile. They are referred to as cattle (59) and “shackled by the same chains”(30), showing their enslavement to the Kanun and a degeneracy of personality. Even during Gjorg’s travels across the Rrafsh, the appearances of passerbys are ambiguous and names are never mentioned. The line, “the section of the road protected by the bessa differed not at all from the rest of the road”(201) is an example of how places in the Rrafsh all appear the same. The motif of repeating landscapes creates an inescapable labyrinth from which the characters, especially Gjorg lose all sense of direction, time and place, reinforcing the inescapability of the Kanun. This geography of the Rrafsh reveals how the repressiveness and inescapability of the Kanun has effaced the identity of people living there and the places surrounding
The line, “it was an ordinary inn, like all the others in the mountain districts, with no signboard…”(36), shows how places are homogenized and appear the same. The ambiguity of the places Gjorg travels to applies to the anonymity and ‘facelessness’ of the inhabitants of Rrafsh. The Kanun runs almost all aspects of a person’s life in the Rrafsh leading to an effacement of identity and individuality of the people in the Rrafsh. As men are fated to follow the endless cycle of the blood feud, personality is futile. They are referred to as cattle (59) and “shackled by the same chains”(30), showing their enslavement to the Kanun and a degeneracy of personality. Even during Gjorg’s travels across the Rrafsh, the appearances of passerbys are ambiguous and names are never mentioned. The line, “the section of the road protected by the bessa differed not at all from the rest of the road”(201) is an example of how places in the Rrafsh all appear the same. The motif of repeating landscapes creates an inescapable labyrinth from which the characters, especially Gjorg lose all sense of direction, time and place, reinforcing the inescapability of the Kanun. This geography of the Rrafsh reveals how the repressiveness and inescapability of the Kanun has effaced the identity of people living there and the places surrounding