Question of Identity: Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk is a leading contemporary Turkish writer and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. In his novels he tackles certain universal themes, such as the search for a new identity, the conflict between East and West, the domination of Western culture and its impact on Turkish society, the spread of consumerism, feminism, the search for love and its vanity. Pamuk is influenced by the rich literary tradition of Turkey and at an equivalent time he is affected with the writers like Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Miller and plenty of others. As a postmodernist author, Orhan pamuk’s fiction echoes the priority for the identity of someone. This novel The White Castle is studied for the exploration of the Question of identity like what is real identity of the person. Pamuk himself has faced the perplexity of identity as he is suspect by media of revealing the national sentiment. The protagonist’s Hoja and the Venetian traveler are not happy with their gift identity and within the course of their life they assume a replacement identity.