The Tactical Act of ‘Walking in the City’: Decoding Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind

Abstract

Narratological explorations on literary representations of collective memory have revealed the presence of specific literary techniques at play in the depiction of memory and identity. As Birgit Neumann (2008) points out, “on the textual level, novels create new models of memory. . . They combine the real and the imaginary, the remembered and the forgotten, and, by means of narrative devices, imaginatively explore the workings of memory, thus offering new perspectives on the past” (p. 333). Delving into the semantic connotations of literary forms, narratives techniques operate as carriers of meaning and offer multiple interpretative possibilities (p. 333). The paper “The Tactical Act of ‘Walking in the City’: Decoding Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind” attempts to delineate how the past experiences and the present coexist in the ‘act of walking in the city’; how it evolves as a crucial narrative strategy that shapes memory and identity into a new matrix to (re)construct the past which remains an abandoned but ubiquitous part of everyday life in Istanbul.