Escaping the Body

As the story continues, we are able to learn more about the person of interest: Orhan Pamuk. This is most evident in the chapter appropriately named "Me" that mostly deals with his characteristics when he was a child. One aspect that I really like about Pamuk's writing is how comfortable he is with his readers. Not every writer would be comfortable writing about he incidents when his "bibi" goes hard from threatening to eat things and his brother's comics. Pamuk is completely open when it comes to his feelings and experiences giving the sensation that he might be writing this book not only for his readers but for himself as well.

In order to introduce himself to the reader, Pamuk starts out with the fact that when his brother started going to school, he found himself most of the time alone. This is a nice tool that Pamuk uses in order to bring the reader closer to himself since, while finding away from his brother for the first time, this is probably the time period in which Pamuk discovered himself too.

The focus of Pamuk's description is that of his separation from the real world. Whether he is talking to his bear or imagining himself killing people while he killed flies, Pamuk never shows much interest in the real world. In fact, Pamuk actually shows a little bit of hate towards the real world and real people being "thankful most of them belonged to the streets outside" (25). One possible reason as to why Pamuk shows such dislike towards the outside world is his lacking in physical qualities, more specifically his height. Pamuk hints at this by describing how his younger self had a sort of obsession towards giants. He would find pleasure in killing flies due to them being so small that they gave him the feeling of being big. As Pamuk describes his complaints on the real world, they mostly involve him being unable to see because he was too small. In the stadium, Pamuk wouldn't be able to see the game because the people in front of him would stand up, and while exiting the stadium, he would feel imprisoned between the many legs of people that were also exiting.

This shines a new light on the meaning behind the other Orhan. Pamuk states that within all his daydreaming was the dream of being able to leave his world by switching with the other Orhan. Orhan sees his life like an imprisonment both physically and spiritually. Daydreams are his method of escape. The idea of another Orhan is not one of another person or another life that he longs to live.