The Center as Represented in The White Castle

When reading The White Castle, it's hard not to pick up on the unreliability of the narrative even without reading the preface.  The narrator's sentences are short and clipped, he is always remarking on how his memory has eluded him, he adheres to all the stereotypes of Turkey, he is condescending, and the passage of time seems to be a vague blur that lapses randomly into decades upon decades of servitude.  It is not necessarily problematic that this narrative paints the Ottoman empire in a bad light.  This could just as well be the result of one person's idiosyncratic experience of an empire that was otherwise accepting of non-Muslims.  The main problem is that he casts all Muslims in a very negative light indirectly.  Without being too heavy-handed, the narrator is able to slip a lot of harsh subtext between the lines.  Even when he praises the sultan for his level headedness and scientific ambition, the narrator shows what the decadence of this new royal influence has had on both his own body and mind.  He has grown fat and has neglected his own ambitions in order to partake in what he wants us to believe is the corruption that is central to the government and Islamic precepts.

The idea of centrality is an interesting way to approach this text.  The Western narrator values reason, progress, his faith, and his identity.  Traditionally, the West's literalized conception of the center revolves around the naval.  It not only stands for the center of the human body but symbolizes the importance of the individual human.  In The White Castle the concept of the naval is subverted and is turned into something malicious and terrible.  For instance, during the plague Hoja grows a bump near his belly button.  For the narrator, this bump becomes the center of attention when focusing on Hoja since it could very well be a symptom of the plague.  He fears the bump not only because of what it might connote about Hoja's health but what it means about his own individuality.  He interprets the bump as the center of Islamic culture- a thing that represents the death of humanity, not its birth, something that stands in direct opposition to the West's "healthy", "natural" center.  Sensing his anxiety, Hoja antagonizes the narrator by stealing the narrator's identity and showing what it would be like to wear this off-center center on a Westerner.  This scares the narrator because he cannot bare the thought of becoming the corruption embodied within the perceived disease of the bump.

The fact that Hoja is supposed to look exactly like the narrator is too perfect for the stolen identity narrative.  As if the master-slave motif weren't enough to make the reader shrink in terror, he adds this added layer to emphasize the depravity of the empire.  Of course, not everything is awful.  The narrator does qualify some of his damning accusations of the Muslims with periods of excitement and pleasure that he had not experienced in Venice.  Also, many of his grievances are understandable (he is a slave after all).  Nevertheless, the narrative seems to be aimed toward an end other than just recounting the story for progeny's sake.  Whatever the reasoning for his subtle condescension, it would be a mistake to take the story too seriously whether the audience is non-Muslim or Muslim.

-Corey Scibilia