In his novel A Strangeness in My Mind, Orhan Pamuk tells us about the
city of Istanbul, which has undergone changes and transformations starting from
the 1950s, through the life and love affair of a street vendor named Mevlut
Karataş, who sells yogurt and boza, a traditional Turkish beverage. Merely from
this aspect, the novel may not seem so inventive or striking. However, the novel is
quite remarkable as a fictional work due to its structural properties, and its
techniques of writing and narration. Pamuk’s original perspective and approach in
tackling and interpreting this seemingly ordinary content is worth placing
emphasis on. For Orhan Pamuk, what distinguishes novels from other narrations
is the presence of an undisclosed center in novels. That center is far from the level
that can be traced through existing words, somewhere in the background, out of
sight and difficult to capture. What we aimed to do in this article was to trace the
central emotion and the idea, which may be regarded as the “major issue” of the
novel. What kind of a second life does the novel A Strangeness in My Mind offer
us? We searched for an answer to this question while also investigating the writing
and the narration techniques.
In his novel A Strangeness in My Mind, Orhan Pamuk tells us about the
city of Istanbul, which has undergone changes and transformations starting from
the 1950s, through the life and love affair of a street vendor named Mevlut
Karataş, who sells yogurt and boza, a traditional Turkish beverage. Merely from
this aspect, the novel may not seem so inventive or striking. However, the novel is
quite remarkable as a fictional work due to its structural properties, and its
techniques of writing and narration. Pamuk’s original perspective and approach in
tackling and interpreting this seemingly ordinary content is worth placing
emphasis on. For Orhan Pamuk, what distinguishes novels from other narrations
is the presence of an undisclosed center in novels. That center is far from the level
that can be traced through existing words, somewhere in the background, out of
sight and difficult to capture. What we aimed to do in this article was to trace the
central emotion and the idea, which may be regarded as the “major issue” of the
novel. What kind of a second life does the novel A Strangeness in My Mind offer
us? We searched for an answer to this question while also investigating the writing
and the narration techniques.
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