The Painted Face Symbol in Nona the Ninth: Analysis and Study Questions

The Dream Image: A Face Held Underwater

Nona's recurring dream is the novel's most intimate and unsettling image. In the first recorded instance, she describes to Camilla a dream of water, a painted face, and hands around her (chapter 3). Later, she elaborates: she is holding a girl with a painted face underwater while arms wrap around her (chapter 16). The dream is not a nightmare of drowning but a scene of ambiguous intimacy—Nona is the one holding the girl down, yet the arms that wrap around her suggest an embrace. The painted face is never described in detail; it is a mask of colour, a surface that obscures rather than reveals. This vagueness makes it a perfect vessel for the novel's central questions about identity, memory, and the boundaries between self and other.

The dream recurs with a sense of compulsion. Nona records it for Camilla, who treats it as clinical data, asking Nona to demonstrate the embrace and positioning Camilla's hands on Nona's hips. The dream is thus not merely a private vision but a piece of evidence—something to be transcribed, analysed, and eventually matched against reality. The painted face is a clue, a fragment of a forgotten past that Nona cannot access directly. It is also a prophecy: the face will turn out to belong to Kiriona Gaia, the corpse prince who is both a stranger and, potentially, the source of Nona's own body.

The Reveal: Kiriona Gaia's Mask

The dream's meaning shifts dramatically when Nona sees the broadcast in chapter 22. On screen, Prince Ianthe Naberius introduces the Emperor's daughter, Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia. Nona recognises the face instantly: it is the face of the girl in her dream. The description emphasises the face's mask-like quality: the skin is pallid and waxy, the mouth bloodless and expressionless, the face a 'grim mask on a forbidding face.' The only living thing about Kiriona is her hair, red and adorned with a wreath of fingerbones and white blossoms. This is the painted face made literal—not paint, but the artificiality of a corpse preserved and presented as royalty. The face is a construction, a public image that conceals the deadness beneath.

Later, when Nona finds Kiriona's body in a bedroom (chapter 34), the dream face is again present, but now it is a corpse laid out in white, with a 'half-past-a-dream expression.' The painted quality is gone; the face is simply dead. Yet the dream's insistence on painting suggests that the face is always a surface, a mask that Nona must see through. In chapter 35, Kiriona reveals herself as Gideon Nav, the original owner of the body Nona now inhabits. The painted face is thus the face of the other—the person Nona might be, or might have been. It is a mirror that Nona cannot recognise as herself.

The Painted Face as Mask and Identity

The symbol operates on multiple levels. Literally, it is a face that has been painted, either with makeup or with the artificial colour of death. But metaphorically, it represents the constructed nature of identity in the novel. Kiriona Gaia is a title, a role, a revenant made by the Emperor John. Her face is a mask that hides the person she was—Gideon Nav—and the person she has become: a dead prince with a mission to open the Tomb. The painted face is also a boundary between the living and the dead. In the dream, Nona holds the girl underwater, a liminal space between air and water, life and death. The act of holding suggests both violence and protection, a desire to keep the girl submerged or to bring her up.

For Nona, the painted face is a symbol of her own uncertain identity. She does not know whose body she inhabits; Palamedes tells her she is probably one of two people, and the evidence points to Gideon Nav. The dream of holding the girl underwater can be read as Nona's unconscious grappling with the other self she carries. The arms that wrap around her might be the embrace of that other self, or the embrace of death itself. The painted face is the face of the other that Nona must confront in order to understand who she is.

Connections to Themes and Characters

The painted face is deeply tied to the novel's exploration of the instability of identity and the self. Nona's body is not her own; her eyes are amber, a sign that another soul resides within her. The dream of the painted face is a recurring reminder that her self is porous, that she is haunted by another. Kiriona's face is similarly unstable: she is both Gideon and Kiriona, a corpse animated by John's necromancy. The painted face is the visible marker of this instability—a surface that shifts between life and death, self and other.

The symbol also connects to the ethics of resurrection and the manipulation of death. John has brought Kiriona back as a revenant, but not fully alive. Her face is a mask of death, a reminder that resurrection in this world is a violation, not a restoration. The dream's underwater imagery suggests a baptism that never happens, a death that is never fully overcome. The painted face is the face of a being who should not exist, a product of necromantic hubris.

For Nona, the dream is also a form of memory. She cannot remember her past, but the dream persists, a fragment of something she has lost. The painted face is a clue to that lost history, a link to Kiriona Gaia and to the events that led to Nona's current state. The dream's intimacy—the holding, the arms—suggests a relationship that transcends death, echoing the theme of love as a force that transcends death and selfhood. Nona's dream may be a memory of Gideon and Harrow, or a premonition of the bond that will form between Nona and Kiriona.

The painted face also resonates with the theme of the betrayal of the many by the powerful. Kiriona is a prince, a tool of the Emperor, and her painted face is the mask of authority that conceals the violence of the Nine Houses. The dream's underwater scene can be read as a drowning of truth, a suppression of the past that the powerful wish to forget. Nona's dream is a persistent return of that repressed truth.

Study Questions

1. How does the painted face function as a symbol of identity in Nona's dream, and how does that meaning change when the face is revealed as Kiriona Gaia?

Answer: In the dream, the painted face is an anonymous, uncanny image that Nona cannot place. It represents the unknown other within herself, the body she may have inherited. When the face is revealed as Kiriona Gaia, the symbol becomes concrete: it is the face of a corpse prince, a constructed identity that hides Gideon Nav's original self. The painted face shifts from a vague premonition to a specific, painful recognition of the other who is both separate from and connected to Nona.

1. What does the act of holding the girl underwater suggest about Nona's relationship to death and to her own body?

Answer: The act is ambiguous—it could be an attempt to drown, to protect, or to baptise. It suggests Nona's ambivalent relationship to death: she is both the agent and the victim of the drowning. The arms that wrap around her imply an embrace, so the scene is not purely violent. It may represent Nona's struggle to integrate the dead self she carries, or her desire to keep that self submerged. The underwater setting is a liminal space, reflecting Nona's own state between life and death, memory and forgetting.

1. How does the painted face connect to the theme of resurrection and its ethical implications?

Answer: Kiriona's face is painted in the sense of being artificially preserved—a corpse made to look princely. The painted face is a mask that conceals the horror of necromantic resurrection, which in this novel is a violation of natural death. The dream's underwater imagery suggests a failed resurrection, a body that cannot be fully brought back. The symbol thus critiques the ethics of John's power, which creates beings like Kiriona who are neither alive nor dead, and whose faces are masks of that unnatural state.

1. In what ways does the painted face serve as a memory device for Nona, and how does it relate to the theme of memory and forgetting?

Answer: The dream is a recurring memory that Nona cannot access consciously. It is a fragment of her past that surfaces despite her amnesia. The painted face is a trigger, a visual cue that connects her to Kiriona and to the events that led to her current state. The dream's persistence suggests that memory is not lost but buried, and that the painted face is a key to unlocking it. This aligns with the theme of memory, forgetting, and the construction of the past, as Nona's dream is a construction that she must interpret to understand her own history.