Arketip bir yolculuk içinde, narsistik bir kitap biçiminde : Beyaz Kale

Orhan Pamuk’s third novel The White Castle (1985) is also his first novel referred to as “hard to read” and “incomprehensible”. These two pieces of feedback from conventional readers looking for a fixed meaning in the text has been given precedence in reception of The White Castle, on the plane of plain readers within and outside Turkey. This book, however, is not a literary work aiming to transmit a fixed meaning but wishing to be received and signified in different ways by displaying its structure with its ecriture. This thesis, which scrutinizes The White Castle less from the perspective of “what to tell” than that of “how to tell” and “what to create” by an active reading, consists of three chapters. The first chapter depicts that in The White Castle the structure encompasses the ecriture and that the reader is a part of this structure. The second chapter reveals the narcissistic dynamics of The White Castle and thereby focuses on how the book “gives awareness” to its reader about its structure and ecriture. The third chapter investigates how the reader joins the archetypal journey of The White Castle. Finally, this thesis attests that The White Castle is a self-reflexive structure, and that the “beloved reader” who becomes aware of its essence activates it into a being.