THE NARRATION ON ISTANBUL BY ORHAN PAMUK: THE BLACK BOOK

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk, who is one of the most well-known storytellers, uses the relationship between a character’s feelings and place descriptions about İstanbul. This quite often makes his novels subjects of architectural literary analysis. Pamuk strongly dwells on the city of İstanbul as background in his novels on account of his own life experiences. This paper aims to understand how Orhan Pamuk reflects İstanbul in The Black Book. The novel tells the story of the era before the military coup in 1980. Due to the socio-political environment, İstanbul was being transformed. However, as a postmodernist writer, Pamuk has seen previous periods of İstanbul so he reflects on his nostalgic feelings that İstanbul should not have changed. Being constructed as a multidirectional and sophisticated narrative layer, İstanbul is the most powerful theme in the novel while the way Pamuk writes about İstanbul is connected with his feelings and life experiences. Different regions within Nişantaşı, a well-known central district in İstanbul, come together in different stories in the novel. In this respect, Pamuk represents complicated relations through the perception of place. His narrative space descriptions are quite realistic but the missing details make the reader realize the difference between reality and fiction. Moreover, Pamuk paints an image of İstanbul that reflects a chaotic environment in the sub-text of the novel. In conclusion, Orhan Pamuk structured a powerful İstanbul theme, which is constructed through his narrative spaces that refer to existing places

Keywords

• Narration of urban space, İstanbul, Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, Atmosphere of narrative space

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