Postmodern narrative techniques in Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red and The Black Book and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle

This study examines the historical, aesthetic, and theoretical foundations of postmodern narrative and offers a comparative analysis of four novels: Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book and My Name is Red, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. The research discusses the intellectual transformations that paved the way for postmodernism, focusing on the shifts in the concepts of reality, representation, subjectivity, and temporality. The aesthetic and structural transformation of the novel from modernism to postmodernism is explored through theoretical frameworks drawn from Bakhtin's dialogism, Lyotard's critique of metanarratives, and key concepts of postmodern fiction. The four novels are analyzed in terms of postmodern narrative strategies such as multiple perspectives, intertextuality, the use of epigraphs, temporal fragmentation, parody, pastiche, collage, bricolage, the dissolution of identity, and the disruption of linear chronology. While Pamuk's novels address questions of cultural memory, identity, and artistic representation within the tension between Eastern and Western aesthetics, Vonnegut's works foreground themes of war, trauma, the collapse of scientific authority, and the instability of meaning in modern American society. The comparative findings reveal that all four novels reinterpret the core principles of postmodernism within their respective cultural and historical contexts. Pamuk blends postmodern techniques with the cultural and literary heritage of the Ottoman–Turkish world, producing an original poetics, whereas Vonnegut employs these techniques to critique the sociopolitical and scientific narratives of twentieth-century America. Thus, the study demonstrates that postmodern fiction is not a singular aesthetic model but a diverse narrative field shaped by multiple cultural perspectives. Keywords: Postmodernism, Novel, Orhan Pamuk, Kurt Vonnegut, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Intertextuality, Narrative Techniques