The White Castle Narrator

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Throughout the course of “The White Castle” we notice that the narrator does a fantastic job at giving readers a clue or sense of what is to come. In doing this, Pamuk uses this tactic as a way to throw the reader off as the story progresses on and the events unfold. After events happen later in the book we notice that Pamuk has events go not as planned as previously foreshadowed earlier in the novel. By doing this, the reader stays hooked to continue to read and learn how things actually end up. Furthermore, an example of this tactic that Pamuk uses in “The White Castle” is where we notice Hoja speaking with the narrator about what he is as a person and the narrator foreshadows the future based on situations similar that have happened in the past. The narrator, or slave, says in his own mind what he believes will be Hoja’s fate in answering this question and we can see that he is flashing forward while also flashing back when he says “This is what I was thinking: I knew, not only from my own experience but from that of my brothers and sisters, that the boredom selfish children experience could lead either to productive results or to nonsense.”(Pamuk, 59) This is a perfect example of how the narrator, or previous slave rather, has knowledge of the future …show more content…

Hoja and the slave appear to look very similar physically in aspects of identity. We notice that the narrator, a previous slave, attempts to escape many times but fails to do so and is trapped, quite literally, like a slave. Through the course of their befriending of each other, the reader is led to believe that at some point in the story, the slave will attempt to take the identity of Hoja to eventually be able to become a free man. After reading the entire story, we find out that this in fact, does not end up taking place and the reader is thrown off from what they are thought to

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