The Frame Narrative in The White Castle

One thing that struck me as very interesting in The White Castle was Orhan Pamuk's use of the frame narrative. The reader, after reading the first part of the story in which a historian finds the manuscript of The White Castle, might think that they were reading the real story of how the story was discovered. However, the name of the historian, Faruk Darvinoglu, is not the name of the author. In fact, this is the name of a fictional character of Pamuk's from another story entirely. Thus, we have a triple-layered story. There is the story of the Italian prisoner/slave, the story of the historian finding the manuscript of The White Castle, and the "real" world inhabited by Orhan Pamuk and the readers. What is the effect of the frame narrative, and what does it have to do with Orientalism?

I believe that Pamuk's use of the frame narrative is a means of holding the reader in a kind of suspension between the "real" world and the world of the main narrative. We are forced, by dint of knowing that we are reading a work of fiction, to detach ourselves from our cultural biases and preconceptions, and to attempt to approach the story from a completely new perspective. On the other hand, we are aware that the narrative is existing within another universe entirely, and that, in passing through the writing of the historian, Faruk, to us, as the readers, its meaning has very likely changed. We cannot look at the narrative of The White Castle in a completely objective manner, because it has already passed through the perspective of another reader before it has been placed before us, so to speak. We understand that whatever biases the main character of the story has are not necessarily his own, and so, as we follow him off the ship and into the enslavement of the enigmatic Hoja, we realise that what we are seeing is not necessarily the objective "truth." The narrator has biases. Faruk has biases. We, as an (ideally) unbiased, third party, must look down upon these layers, peel them back, and say, "Why is this here? What made him say that?"

The narrative, dealing with the conflict between Catholics and Muslims, does not let us easily pick a "side" to support. This, too, goes hand in hand with the narrator's problem of identity. Just as he has an identity crisis when faced with the Hoja, so too are we not quite sure where we fit in in terms of The White Castle. Our place is in that strange suspension between the narrative and our real-world interpretation of the narrative's events. Our foreknowledge that what we are reading exists in a state of suspension, itself, in another literary "world" makes us, as readers, wary of too carelessly taking sides. This ensures that the reader steps back and really analyzes just what it is that they are reading. They can look at both sides of the conflict more easily. This also allows Orhan Pamuk to let his protagonist "live" the events of the story freely. Pamuk does not necessarily have to make his protagonist unbiased; the fact that we, the reader, are in a state of suspension between the real world and the world of the narrative ensures that we are unbiased, and that we can thus approach The White Castle from a more critical perspective.