An analysis of foe and the white castle novels within postmodern context

Techniques such as intertextuality, metafiction, parody, and pastiche, frequently used in postmodern literature, are creating wide studying areas for readers, writers, and critics. Especially with the metafiction and intertextuality techniques, postmodern authors keep the reader alive by adding dynamism and difference to their works. In this context, Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle novel and J. M. Coetzee's Foe novel contain many postmodern elements. Orhan Pamuk presents examples of metafiction, such as making a novel character write a preface to another novel or changing narrators in his novel The White Castle. In addition, Pamuk, who deals with a historical subject in the novel, exemplifies the intertextuality technique by combining reality and fiction, using historical places, old sources, and characters. On the other hand, Coetzee in his novel Foe rewrites Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe by mocking it, and he chooses the protagonist of the novel as a woman on the contrary of the writing philosophy of the period, and adds Cruso as an old and passive character of the novel. The relationship between Susan, the narrator of the novel, and Foe (known as a writer in the novel), who will write the story of Cruso, constitutes an important example for the metafiction technique. At the same time, it has been a work worth examining in the context of intertextuality by referring to many works. In this study, it is aimed to analyse the two novels mentioned in the context of postmodern elements; metafiction and intertextuality.