Voices from the Margin: Narrative Multiplicity and the Construction of Social Identity in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red employs a radical narrative strategy—giving voice to humans, objects, and even colors—to interrogate the complex interplay between culture, belief, and social identity in 16th-century Ottoman Istanbul. This article, “Voices from the Margin: Narrative Multiplicity and the Construction of Social Identity in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red,” explores how Pamuk’s polyphonic structure dismantles hierarchical epistemologies and challenges monologic constructions of identity. By granting narrative agency to marginal entities—a murdered miniaturist, a gold coin, a tree, and the color red itself—Pamuk foregrounds the instability and multiplicity inherent in social and cultural selfhood. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia and postcolonial critiques of center-periphery dynamics, the study argues that narrative multiplicity in the novel functions as a subversive tool that decenters dominant ideologies, particularly those surrounding Islamic orthodoxy, artistic representation, and Ottoman cosmopolitanism. The tension between Persian miniature tradition and Western portraiture becomes a metaphor for competing modes of seeing and being, reflecting broader anxieties about cultural authenticity and external influence. Through this kaleidoscopic narration, Pamuk reveals identity not as a fixed essence but as a contested, performative, and dialogic process shaped by history, art, and power. The article further contends that marginalized voices in the novel symbolize the silenced pluralities within Ottoman society, offering an alternative historiography that resists singular narratives of nation or faith. Ultimately, My Name Is Red emerges as a profound meditation on how social identity is constructed, fractured, and reimagined through storytelling itself.