While many of the works we’ve read this semester have dealt
with similar themes, particularly questions of identity and characters’
struggle to find their place in the world, many of the books we’ve covered have
done so using entirely different literary forms that portray these themes through either vast and changing settings and
plot events and extended narratives or smaller, more specific settings and a
detailed discussions of specific characters and events. Derek Walcott’s Omeros is an epic poem, Naguib Mafouz’ Echoes of an Autobiography is a collection of extremely short prose
pieces, and Istanbul and White Castle, the two Orhan Pamuk books
we’ve read, tackle the issue of identity,
for both individuals and societies, using a non-fiction, autobiographical form
and fictional narrative, respectively. Because
these four pieces, in particular, contain similar themes throughout, it is
particularly interesting to analyze the way in which form relates to function
and changes the way in which the themes of identity come across to the reader.
Omeros was,
debatably, the most unusual work covered this semester. Modern epic poems certainly exist, but they
are not particularly common, and even within the genre of epic poetry, Omeros is somewhat unusual. Often shifting or ambiguous, the narration in
Walcott’s epic is sometimes hard to follow as it changes between Seven Seas, an
unnamed narrator, Omeros, and Walcott himself.
Changes in geographic location, though typical within the epic form, are
also common, with the setting shifting from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia
to Africa, the United States, and various parts of Europe. The setting of Omeros, as well as the sheer number of plot events, is vast, and in
many ways, Walcott uses the breadth and movement of the epic form to create a sense
of aloneness and crisis, of a changing world in which characters and places are
often left behind. Walcott’s epic also
takes place over a long period of time, adding to the vastness of not only the
geographic setting but enlarging the setting in terms of the passage of time.
Orhan Pamuk’s White
Castle, a novel that explores the idea of identity crisis and the
individuality of human beings through two men, an unnamed narrator and a scholar
known as Hoja, who are evidently so similar that one could replace the other
without the general public taking any particular notice. Like Omeros,
Pamuk’s novel is an extended narrative and with a relatively large setting
in terms of both time and place. While
the story takes place primarily in 17th century Istanbul, the
protagonists do travel throughout Europe, and the novel’s setting is extremely
large in terms of time, with most of the unnamed narrator’s life contained in
the narrative. In some senses, White Castle is just as “vast” as Omeros, but in another sense, its lack
of shifting narration and focus on one or two particular characters throughout
make it a much more specific work, approaching the idea of identity crisis with
more depth and less breadth. If Omeros is a national or international
survey with a vast test group, White
Castle is something closer to a case study.
In Omeros and White Castle, the theme of a struggle to
find one’s identity in the midst of a changing world is, clearly, convey
through the medium of fiction. The characters
and events in these works, save the few instances where Walcott chooses to conspicuously
insert himself into the narrative of Omeros,
are imagined and created by the author, and though the settings are
realistic, they are not intended to be entirely accurate and historically
correct. Pamuk’s Istanbul and Naguib Mafouz Echoes
of an Autobiography, however, fall into the category of non-fiction, a
genre which necessarily requires that the themes of a work be approached in a
way that is generally more literal, straightforward, and specific.
Istanbul is, in many ways, about the same issues as Omeros and White Castle. Pamuk potrays
himself and his city lost, confused, and struggling to find identity in the
face of change. As an artist, Pamuk
feels out of place and unaccepted by his family, and as a people group, Pamuk’s
family and other members of the old aristocracy in Istanbul feel out of place
in a city that is rapidly changing and leaving their way of life behind. These struggles, along with the struggles of
Walcott’s island characters and the protagonists in White Castle, are all the result of the same question, “where do I belong?” In his memoir, however, Pamuk chooses to make
these issues more specific and more personal, identifying the struggle for
identity in his own life and narrowing down the affects of what seems like a
universal struggle in order to discuss the ways in which this is not only the
world’s struggle but the struggle of his city, his family, and himself.
Naguib Mafouz, also the author of the collection of short
stories titled Arabian Nights and Days, apparently
prefers to compile a number of shorter pieces in the effort to tell a larger
story, and in he does this to the extreme in Echoes of an Autobiography. This
book, apparently non-fiction, is a collection of tiny narratives, some mere
sentences, that share that generally address issues of life, death, the purpose
of existence, and the ways in which we find our place in the world as human
beings. If those sound like enormous
topics to cover using a serious of small vignettes, they are, yet somehow, the
specificity of these tiny stories is what makes them so powerful. Many of the “entries” in Echoes of an Autobiography are conversational in nature, though
others are simply small narrative pieces, yet this series of small “case
studies” come together as a description
of Mafouz’ own life experiences and the ideas that have shaped him. Ideas like the inevitability of death and the
importance or invisibility of the individual are common in Echoes, and the form manages to convey these ideas using both
specificity and diversity that would never have been present to the same extent
in a traditional autobiography or memoir.
Form, though sometimes overlooked, is an important aspect of
any work of literature, and the diversity of form exhibited in these four books
shows just how differently similar ideas and themes can be expressed. In general, however, I appreciated the
specificity and honesty of the two autobiographical works and found the vastness
of Omeros’ plot and setting more of a
hinderence to the successful conveyance of the poem’s major themes. Still, the use of literary forms that
contributed to either breadth and vastness or depth and specificity helped show
the ways in which finding our place in the world, our identity, is a concern of
both individuals and humankind as a whole, a constant question that is entwined
with the human story.