The novel is littered with vivid, sensual images of food that function both literally and metaphorically. The novel’s dramatic opening immediately emphasizes the suffering caused by hunger, cold, and exhaustion:

You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier—all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages—eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat (9).

On a literal level, Lev and his friends are desperately hungry and craving any morsel of food they can find; metaphorically, the intense cravings also convey their extreme deprivation on every level, physical, emotional, and sexual. The feeling of being satisfied, whether through food, sex, or other comforts, is a distant memory:

Fish soup. I hadn’t had fish soup since summer. The idea of it was wild and exotic, like a naked girl on a Pacific island (48).

Throughout the novel images of food are conveyed in such rich and scintillating detail so that readers can empathize with the extreme hunger and deprivation experienced by the characters. We are not merely witnessing their suffering and their cravings, we are experiencing it with them.