The Narrative of Cultural Relationship Between East and West in the Novel the White Castle and Orhan Pamuk's Intellectual Perspective

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle presents a complex exploration of the cultural relationship between East and West. Set in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, the novel narrates the story of an Italian captive and a Turkish scholar, Hoja, whose intellectual and psychological relationship gradually becomes a symbolic encounter between two civilizations. The Italian captive represents Western rationality, scientific knowledge, and individual consciousness, while Hoja reflects the Eastern world, shaped by tradition, authority, and a desire to acquire Western knowledge. This article examines the novel as a narrative of cultural dialogue, identity crisis, knowledge, and power. Through the physical resemblance, intellectual exchange, and eventual exchange of identities between the two characters, Pamuk challenges the rigid division between East and West. The novel suggests that cultural identities are not fixed or pure; rather, they are fluid, unstable, and formed through contact, imitation, resistance, and mutual influence.