초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Avatar motives in world literature has been handled in the meaning of broken self, suppressed self, or of human’s innate duality. This may be that the other self that can be described as a double personality is a symbol representing the contrary attribute that is intrinsic to us human beings. Not only this, it is because problems of self consciousness or a self separated from oneself hold an undividable relationship. Orhan Pamuk has written high grade literatures that are interesting but heavy, talk about other time and space but reflect the spirit of the current era, with the common interest of the world as their main themes while maintaining uniqueness. This seems to be because only those literatures can sense the changes of the era, step forward towards the exit of the maze, and produce a new kind of literature for the new era. Pamuk’s favorite theme of his search in his literature is the avatar motive. The main characters of the literature, considered an avatar of the author, seek to find the answer for the search for their identities by producing an avatar, or becoming somebody else. This search ends with either identity change or the main character becoming another person. This can be interpreted that when the character faces a serious confusion of self-identity, he/she tries to establish an alternative ego by somebody else. White Castle, the piecework that put Pamuk at the world level,begins with Osman Empire’s Hoca, person very interested in Western scholarship, and a slave-sold Venetian who see their own reflections from each other. The novel holds its main structure by putting these two characters in a same house and, at the end, their identities changing. The Black Book, the novel that is evaluated as Pamuk’s most experimental novel, expresses the journey throughout Istanbul of a lawyer Galip looking for his wife and his cousin Celal, a columnist and a mentor of Galip as well as the process of his change in this progress. As it can be observed in the two novels above, writers of Turkey, a place located at the meeting point of East and West, have long used the other self motive depicted by the confusion in identity caused by fate as well as imitating other races for not being able to truly be oneself and at the end becoming someone else as the main theme. On the other hand, these two novels are similar in the sense of expressing one’s identity or discovery of other self through writing. In The White Castle is a transcription of a Venetian slave’s memoir written over the 40 years he had spent in the Osman Empire. Hoca and the slave begin to know about each other through writing. Later,Hoca leaves for Italy and becomes famous by writing a book on Turkey. Thus, Hoca and the slave reveal their identity through writing. In The Black Book, Galip lives the life of Celal by writes columns in the place of Celal and thinks that he can find his own identity through writing by thinking “There is nothing more wonderful as life. Except writing, right, the only consolation.” This can be said to be a confirmation of Pamuk’s saying, “in fact, all writers try to be someone else” in the form of a novel.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Identity, Avatar, Orhan Pamuk, Turkish Novels, The White Castle, The Black Book
