The Imagined Exile: Orhan Pamuk in His Novel Snow

Abstract

The concept with which Orhan Pamuk associates his novel Snow in his speech as the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature—the novelist’s imagination as a chance to alter one’s own identity by transforming the “other” into the self—constitutes this chapter’s core concern. “[G]reat literature speaks not to our powers of judgment, but to our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s place,”² the author states. “The world to which I wish to belong is, of course, the world of the imagination,” he announces, adding, “it is the imagination of the novelist that gives the bounded world of everyday life its particularity, its magic and its soul.”³ Snow is a canvas on which Pamuk designs a soulful life of particularity and magic for his protagonist Ka—a word choice that conveys his creative idiosyncrasy from the onset as it evokes “kar,” snow, in his native tongue as well as Kars, the Turkish city where he unfolds Ka’s life in momentous transformations. Ka’s born identity also attains distinctiveness, for Pamuk has him eliminate both his names, implicating him with a violation of the country’s law on family names.⁴