East-West Dichotomy in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle is a historical novel that is set during the Ottoman reign. The novel presents the metaphysical opposition of East and West, self and the other, intuition and reason, mysticism, science and global and local, and the recurring issues of conflict of civilization, identity crisis, and cultural variations. Orhan Pamuk as a postmodern writer tries to bridge the gap between the East and the West through his writings. Although Turkey is at the backdrop in most of his novels, the treatment of themes is universal. The paper proposes the theory of Orientalism by Edward Said, which represents the encounter and treatment of the "Orient." The concept of identity expressed by Pamuk in his wide range of novels also can be related to the “Orient” and “Occident.” The culture of the East has always been portrayed as the binary opposite of Europe in history and fiction. The loss of identity of the East reflected in the works of Pamuk is an outcome of the clash between East and Europe, further leading to chaotic contexts and dilemmatic protagonists. Individuals unable to choose between the traditional self and the fashionable West mourn the lost identity of a country and their self.