Saniye Çancı Çalışaneller’s “Doppelgänger in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book”: The Nobel Prize novelist’s theme about multiple personality in writers. 

“Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book narrates Galip’s search for his wife Rüya and his journalist cousin Jelal…this reading of The Black Book claims that although it seems there are two different characters as Galip and Jelal in the novel, Galip and Jelal are the same person since Jelal symbolizes the second self or author self of Galip…

“Throughout the novel, although Rüya and Jelal seem to have material existence, their existence could be called into question…In Turkish, rüya means dream and, in certain passages in The Black Book, it is not possible to comprehend exactly whether the narrator talks about a person whose name is Rüya, or just a dream… while Galip is trying to find his wife Rüya, he accomplishes his dream (rüya) of being a writer…

“As for Jelal, he is mentioned in the novel only when Galip reads Jelal’s articles… According to Galip, when Jelal narrates something, ‘the world would make sense, transforming the “hidden” realities right under our noses into the rich fare of an astonishing story that we already knew but didn’t know that we knew, thereby making life more bearable’… Galip’s search for Jelal turns out to be a search for writing… Jale Parla, who claims that Galip’s identity is split during his search for his double or other self Jelal, defines The Black Book as an allegoric story that narrates the birth of a writer…

“… after Jelal disappears, Galip moves into Jelal’s flat, wears Jelal’s clothes, sleeps in Jelal’s bed, and pretends to be Jelal by answering the phone…The first subjective persona…is Galip who leads an ordinary life, while the second objective one is Jelal as Galip’s author self. The third persona, who is described as “the dark persona,” refers to the third person narrator of this book…

“ Galip feels that he gradually loses his own identity…‘I sensed at once that the person whom we watched in the mirror sitting in the chair was not “I” but somebody else’…In this passage, the person who looks through the mirror is Galip, but what he sees in the mirror is the columnist Jelal…Thus, the fact that Galip sees Jelal in the mirror indicates that Galip has split identity…”

Search “mirror” or “mirrors” in this blog for further discussion of mirrors in multiple personality.

bilig, Spring 2011/Number 57, 1-15: https://eresearchm.ozyegin.edu.tr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10679/276/Doppelg%C3%A4nger%20in%20Orhan%20Pamuk%E2%80%99s%20The%20Black%20Book.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Saniye Çancı Çalışaneller is Lecturer, Baskent University, Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of American Culture and Literature, Ankara.