| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 96 === In 2006, Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his fourth published novel, My Name is Red. From then on, he has established his fame as a novelist, and become one of the most prolific contributors to world literature as well as modern humanity. Pamuk is an extremely localized novelist, the backgrounds of his several novels are all set in his native country of Turkey, especially in the city where he was born and raised, Istanbul. His writing always deals with the confrontation of Eastern and Western ideologies, which can be regarded also as part of the “globalization.” And Pamuk is also widely recognized as a postmodern novelist, due to his ample use of postmodern techniques in all of his novels. Thanks to Pamuk’s focus on cultural difference and cultural mingling, and also his avant-garde, postmodernist narrative skill, Pamuk has achieved success as a novelist.
The story of My Name is Red, which takes the form of detective novel, is based upon the cultural and ideological conflicts in the field of Turkish painting and illustration. This novel is narrated by numerous first-person narrators, who are at the same time characters in the story. Moreover, in My Name is Red, there are also unexpected narrators, who are in fact “pictures.” Thus, this novel is arguably composed of heterogeneous voices, and therefore in this thesis, it will be analyzed in terms of these voices.
First, I will briefly introduce the background of this novel, its heteroglossia, and postmodern narrative techniques above all the voices of multiple and sometimes unexpected narrators as well as the voice of the author himself. The first chapter is entitled, “Conflicting Voices.” Here I will point out all the different ideologies and beliefs regarding painting and life in the East and West presented in the novel. Multiple narrators can generate heterogeneous and even conflicting voices, which constitutes heteroglossia of the novel. Chapter two, “Postmodern Voices,” will focus on Pamuk’s postmodernism, moving to a deeper discussion of how he portrays his multiple personae by presenting all of his narrators in the first-person, and making them constantly aware of the presence of the reader. The third chapter, “Authorial Voices,” will discuss Pamuk’s authorial intrusion and in general authorial influence in this novel by contrasting his “living” authorial presence with Barthes’s “ghostly” author. This chapter further shows the connection between the author and all the narrative voices he has created. The final chapter will sum up all the preceding chapters, explaining how Pamuk enhances the tensions and the conflicts of the story with his Bakhtinian and postmodern techniques. It will also reflect on the true message that Pamuk may be attempting to convey with this novel.
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