The White Castle: Reading Response

Orhan Pamuk's novel, The White Castle, deals explicitly with the issue of identity, not surprisingly, as his autobiography Istanbul deals a great bit with that topic as well. Throughout The White Castle, the question of whether and individual can be replaced by another and whether anyone would really notice is proposed.

It is a bit twisted, of course, but a fascinating idea. Really, what does our identity mean and what does it lie in? What would it matter if we died today? It was odd because as I was reading The White Castle, I had already found myself pondering on a similar question on my own. I had remembered hearing about an almost tragedy that occurred to a boy I knew and thinking, momentarily, better him than me. I immediately felt ashamed for that thought and took it back, but it was too late. I had already released it fromt he vault. Now why better that boy than me? Why better one person than another? Is any one person's identity really worth that much more than any other person's, and if so, why?

The White Castle deals with this issue in exploring the life a man who becomes enslaved by a man whom is referred to as Hoja, meaning master, in Istanbul, a man whom he also happens to look strikingly similar to. The Hoja is obsessed with knowing every detail of the young man's life, as well as recording all of the details of his own. The entire novel focuses on a search for self-knowledge as the slave and the Hoja sit down and try to record and understand why they are what they are. They come to an ultimate conclusion about stories, that “the ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.”

One has to wonder after finishing the book, if there were even really two characters at all, or if it was only ever the slave, or only ever the Hoja talking to himself in the mirror. Probably not, but Pamuk makes this feel like a possibility, which is where the brilliance of his book lies. It also lies in that he was able to write a story that followed exactly the recipe that his characters decided upon within the novel. However, whether the characters were real, whether they were simply talking to themselves or writing down something fantastical, whether any of it was really true at all, it does what a good novel should do, in that it makes the reader question identity and grapple with the same questions the characters are grappling with. Why am I what I am, every reader must ask themselves, perhaps while staring into the mirror for so long that their face no longer seems to resemble a face anymore by the end of it. And hopefully, after all that staring and all that thinking, and with the help of Pamuk's characters' conclusions as well, one will come to some answer, some sense of self-discovery. In this way, Pamuk hit the nail on the head, because identity and self-discovery are truly the issues that the human race, from my perspective anyway, seems ultimately most concerned with.