ORHAN PAMUK’UN AYDINLARI: DOĞULU VE/VEYA BATILI OLMAK YA DA OLAMAMAK
ORHAN PAMUK’S INTELLECTUALS: BECOMING OR NOT BEING ABLE TO BECOME AN EASTERNER AND/OR A WESTERNER

Summary/Abstract: With literature in the Tanzimat Period, Westernization, or in other words, the issue of East and West was one of the problematics of several people of letters including Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Peyami Safa and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. One of the Turkish authors who discussed this problematic is Orhan Pamuk. While this study utilized all of Orhan Pamuk’s novels, it discussed four: Cevdet Bey and His Sons, the White Castle, Silent House, the Black Book. The main problematics of the characters in these novels are East-West, Easternization-Westernization, being Turkish-foreign, ability or inability to be yourself.In Cevdet Bey and His Sons, while discussing philosophical, cultural and economic issues, Pamuk tries to represent the search of the individual, his ostracized nature, his conflict with the society and the system, and the answer to the question “why is Turkey like this and why is Europe like that?” through the eyes of the characters. In Silent House, we learn about how Turkey has progressed through the minds of the narrators. In the White Castle and the Black Book, what concerns the novel characters is the imitation of the West. Imitation would bring happiness for them, because it is impossible to be yourself in this country of losers. Turks who want to buy a dream and become like “others”, would never reach the white castles of the West. Therefore, they would live in this country of losers by always imitating others and they will never be themselves.

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