The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

The White Castle is a novel that examines the concept of identities, eastern and western cultures, and the power of knowledge. I was particularly drawn to the idea of individuality and its frailty as seen in the love-hate relationship of Hoja and the narrator. Hoja, a Turkish scholar and scientist, buys the narrator from a slave ship in Venice in order to extract foreignknowledge from him.  But through their learning, collaborating, and researching for the pasha and the sovereign later on, it's clear that the differences of culture and knowledge between them are not so different after all.    Their physical appearances were too similar to be coincidence: "The resemblance between myself and the man...was incredible! It was me…" (22). Later on, when Hoja was tired and didn't want to submit to the sultan's order to visit him he sent the narrator instead. The sultan, also, calls it a "matchless wonder" that they were "alike as peas in a pod" (113). Not only were they physically alike, but they also became connected with each other so that the narrator calls Hoja his "real self" and feels indignantly separated from him during a parade celebrating the end of the plague: "It wasn't that I wished to seize a share in the triumph...I should be by his side, I was Hoja's very self! I had become separated from my real self and was seeing myself from the outside" (98). Yet it was not always a genial relationship. The desire to be someone else - to be Hoja - was necessarily paired with the refusal to conform and maintain self-identification.

I think that Pamuk's intentional blurring of individuality comes at a price. The narrator's desire to be like Hoja, even to become Hoja himself, is fulfilled at the conclusion of the novel. The two men switch names, countries, cultures, and identities, proving the sultan's assertion that "men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other's place" (151). After sharing the incredible story with a traveler, the narrator wonders if he truly believes that "those two men who had taken each other's places could be happy in their new lives?" (155). His adoration of Hoja, mixed with the "sad memories" of their lives together reminded him of the "wretched ghost of [his] self" (155). In essence, they were not just two individuals who have become very close to each other; they had become each other so that loving oneself was loving the other: "And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself" (155).