8 thru 14
Chapter 8
Blue to some extent owes his reputation to the westernized Turkish media, delivering him from obscurity to the center of public attention, scrutiny, and admiration. He cuts a stark contrast to the other men we have met, whose self-pity and defeatism are dwelt upon at length by the author. Blue possesses tremendous self-confidence. The title and subtitle of this chapter are quite interesting, "Suicide is a Terrible Sin" and "Blue and Rustem," respectively. The first, in essence, might be a shallow moral drawn from Ka and Blue's conversation. The second represents the grit of this chapter. The moral of the story of Rustem and Suhrab is not what the content offers, but is its status as a forgotten tale in modern Turkey. Blue laments the systematic erasure of his culture by his own people, due in part to the self-alienating effects of juxtaposing the "backwards" East and the "fashionable" West. (Erasure as a theme in this novel must not be taken lightly.) So, perhaps, there might be a parallel between the story Blue tells and the story the narrator is telling. What is the subtextual message being offered in addition to the contextual?
Does the narrator mark Blue for death at the hands of the father figure by supplanting his name for Suhrab's?
General Thoughts
This span of chapters gave rise to several questions that remained unanswered. Ka escaped the beating, but not the interrogation:
"Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it" (85).
"Are you an atheist... And if you are an atheist, do you want to kill yourself?" (91)
"Do they have a different God in Europe?" and "Do you really want guidance from me?" (104)
"If God does not exist, how do you explain all the suffering of the poor?"
"How do you write poems?"
The narrator frequently employs texts within texts (the newspaper article and Necip's Sci Fi story) and storytelling (Blue's Rustem and Necip's story about the atheist). I think this will continue.
Teslime's suicide emerges as the central dilemma of the novel.
The way Ka creates poetry...
East/West divide and clash over religion and politics in light of class distinctions.
Blue to some extent owes his reputation to the westernized Turkish media, delivering him from obscurity to the center of public attention, scrutiny, and admiration. He cuts a stark contrast to the other men we have met, whose self-pity and defeatism are dwelt upon at length by the author. Blue possesses tremendous self-confidence. The title and subtitle of this chapter are quite interesting, "Suicide is a Terrible Sin" and "Blue and Rustem," respectively. The first, in essence, might be a shallow moral drawn from Ka and Blue's conversation. The second represents the grit of this chapter. The moral of the story of Rustem and Suhrab is not what the content offers, but is its status as a forgotten tale in modern Turkey. Blue laments the systematic erasure of his culture by his own people, due in part to the self-alienating effects of juxtaposing the "backwards" East and the "fashionable" West. (Erasure as a theme in this novel must not be taken lightly.) So, perhaps, there might be a parallel between the story Blue tells and the story the narrator is telling. What is the subtextual message being offered in addition to the contextual?
Does the narrator mark Blue for death at the hands of the father figure by supplanting his name for Suhrab's?
General Thoughts
This span of chapters gave rise to several questions that remained unanswered. Ka escaped the beating, but not the interrogation:
"Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it" (85).
"Are you an atheist... And if you are an atheist, do you want to kill yourself?" (91)
"Do they have a different God in Europe?" and "Do you really want guidance from me?" (104)
"If God does not exist, how do you explain all the suffering of the poor?"
"How do you write poems?"
The narrator frequently employs texts within texts (the newspaper article and Necip's Sci Fi story) and storytelling (Blue's Rustem and Necip's story about the atheist). I think this will continue.
Teslime's suicide emerges as the central dilemma of the novel.
The way Ka creates poetry...
East/West divide and clash over religion and politics in light of class distinctions.
posted by AJV at 6:24 PM
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