Perception, Reality, and a Quest for Unity

          In the first half of Ohran Pamuk’s The White Castle, Hoja exhibits great curiosity about science, literature, and the world around him.  His quest for knowledge seems to stem from the need to create a unified reality.  Every object has its place, from the stars in the sky to the gears in his oversized clock.  He is obsessed with making models and questioning their accuracy.  The narrator, on the other hand, is a vision of disunity.  He is both physically displaced and mentally incoherent, openly mixing memory with imagination.  Hoja’s quest for universal harmony juxtaposed with the narrator’s frustratingly disjointed identity has interesting implications about the perceived dichotomy between the East and the West. 

The same gap between perception and reality that leads to the narrator’s muddled identity and Hoja’s desire for unity is also responsible for more general stereotypes about “the East” and “the West.”  Hoja demands that the narrator teach him all he knows from his education in Venice.  Not only does he legally own the narrator, he claims the sum of his intellect as well.  The narrator feels underappreciated by his Turkish doppelganger to whom he was forced to surrender much of his individual identity.  Once the narrator’s knowledge and understanding of the world becomes Hoja’s, the master uses it to develop new theories and ideas beyond the narrator’s comprehension.  So, when Hoja took the narrator’s identity, he fit it into the existing structure of his previous worldview and thereby made it his own.  Although Hoja is an “Eastern” character, the way he alters his slave’s identity by trying to place it within his own subjectively designed universe is suggestive of orientalism.

While Hoja fills the gaps in his models with science and factual information, the narrator covers the holes in his identity with imagination.  The reader knows, through both the preface and the confession of the narrator himself, that the story being told is only semi-true even in the fictional world. While some events are confirmed, others are potentially or admittedly conjured for the sake of fluidity.  The story’s various metafictional layers amplify this factual uncertainty.  For the English-speaking audience, The White Castle is the real translation of a fictional translation of a semi-fictional manuscript.  Even the dedication immediately following the copyright is made up.  All parties, from the real translator to the fictional translator to the narrator, have digested and therefore changed the story before it reaches the mind of the reader, where it is altered once again to fit within the reader’s own worldview.  Therefore, the orientalist tendency to fill confusion and misunderstanding with fiction is exemplified through the uniquely structured narration and the narrator himself.  The meeting of Hoja and the narrator is representative of a meeting between East and West in which individual perceptions are impressed upon and consequently change the “other.”