Epigraphical relationships in Orhan Pamuk's Snow

ABSTRACTEPIGRAPHICAL RELATIONSHIPS IN ORHAN PAMUK?S SNOWRiley, Nathaniel BrannM.A., Department of Turkish LiteratureSupervisor: Dr. Süha OğuzertemJune 2007Orhan Pamuk?s political novel Snow?s multifaceted provocativeness is aconscious strategy of literary contrast designed to question all manner of prejudice.By attracting attention to the inaccuracy of stereotypical labels, the identity-relatedcontradictions in the novel?s characters invite the reader to originality andindividualism. The book?s illustration of opposites like white-black and heaven-hellusing blurry shades of gray and pastels, as well as the snowflake diagram?smultidimensional symmetry, indicate the fundamental irreducibility of reality?scomplexity.Within this context, the epigraphs quoted from Robert Browning?s ?BishopBlougram?s Apology?, Stendhal?s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse ofParma), Dostoyevsky?s The Possessed (or The Demons or The Devils), and JosephConrad?s Under Western Eyes all bear significance for Snow. When the partlyconcrete, partly abstract similarities between Snow and its epigraphical sources aretaken as the point of departure, several apparently significant structural contrastsstand out. Ultimately, this strategy of contrast can be evaluated as pluralist and anti-Orientalist, as opposed to prejudiced and racist as widely supposed. Thus, more thanmere deferential ?tips of the hat? to the masters of the political novel genre, Snow?sepigraphs may be considered intertextual replies, parallels or parodies.Keywords: Intertextuality, Contrast, Oxymoron, Prejudice, Architectureiv