Response to Orhan Pamuk's "The White Castle"

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle, like many of the works we’ve read this semester, is about a crisis of identity.  The novel’s narrator, a young Italian, is captured by an Ottoman ship while sailing from Naples to Venice.  After impersonating a doctor in an attempt to save his own life, the narrator eventually end up a slave, working for a scholar named “Hoja” (meaning master) who is nearly identical to him in physical appearance.  Much of The White Castle focuses on the complexity of the slave-master relationship between the unnamed narrator and Hoja, a relationship that is made more complex by the remarkable similarities between the two men.  Both Hoja and the unnamed narrator are intellectual figures, though each has a markedly different worldview, and as they work on building a weapon to destroy the white castle for which the novel is named, they seem to learn from each other in the process.  As the story progresses, the slave-master relationship becomes less and less pronounced, and though the narrator initially thinks that he has nothing to offer Hoja, he slowly becomes aware that the similarity between himself and his master is so profound that the two could easily trade identities.  This realization becomes bothersome to the narrator, and it calls into question, in a more general sense, the nature of human beings as individuals. 

Near the end of chapter 9, the narrator speaks of a recurring dream in which he and Hoja are “at a masked ball in Venice reminiscent in its confusion of the feasts of Istanbul.” (125)  Recognizing his mother and fiancée in the crowd, the narrator removes his mask in hopes that they will recognize him but realizes to his horror that his family is pointing to a man standing behind him.  “When I turned to look,” says the narrator, “I saw that this person who would know I was me was Hoja.  Then when I approached him, the man who was Hoja took off his mask without a word and from behind it, terrifying me with a pang of guilt that woke me from my dream, emerged the image of my youth.”  (125)  The narrator’s identity is so caught up in Hoja’s that the lines are blurred, and even for the narrator, separating the identities of the two men becomes difficult.  This ambiguity related to the identities of Hoja and the narrator is most extreme in the novel’s final chapter, in which the narrator, whose identity is not disclosed, claims to have heard the story from a traveler and written it down.  There is some doubt at this point about whether or not the previously recounted events ever took place, and neither Hoja nor the unnamed narrator are mentioned in the final chapter, only an ambiguous and always capitalized “He.”  It is this section, perhaps, that most powerfully presents the issue of identity and human individuality (or lack thereof), as it causes even the reader to blur the line between Hoja and the narrator.