Languages as Obsession：Deciphering Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul：Memories of a City

Diversity in a narrative represents the multitude of narrative perspectives and similarities that co-exist in different dimensions of a single story. Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories of a City, encompasses not only narrative diversity but also collective mixtures of narrative techniques. Pamuk’s remembrance of things past ranges from an obsessive language full of incessant repetition of words, images, and phrases, to a kind of polyphonic representation of a variety of voices symbolizing the revelation of synchronic and diachronic events, and to visual illustrations of more than one hundred photographs. All these three features provide a new way of thinking about differences between the art of traditional autobiographies and Pamuk’s highlighting narrative technique. While the memoir focuses on deciphering historical Ottoman Empire and individual melancholy, readers can encounter an unaccustomed reading experience by examining the barriers and challenges associated with different language-related descriptions.