Games of make-believe as a form of communication in Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul

Abstract

The contemporary Turkish novelist Burhan Sönmez’s third novel İstanbul İstanbul (2015) is primarily a narrative about the power of storytelling in a life-threatening context. Four prisoners try hard to overcome the painful flow of time in their underground cell through recounting, remembering, and (re)constructing stories. By connecting the four totally strange characters together, storytelling alleviates their agony and distress through enabling them to find relief in the alternative worlds and/or realities. As it is mainly argued in this paper, the prisoners’ storytelling activity depends on their games of make-believe which are used as the primary means of communication among them. Through their pretence, the prisoner-narrators replace the horrible reality of the cell with the pleasant alternative realities of the storyworlds they recount. Thus, by referring to Kendall Walton’s theory of Games of Make-Believe, the present paper tries to show how by acting as props the recounted stories in Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul are used as the means of communication to evoke the readers’ (emotional) response and encourage their active participation in the characters’ mimetic pretence.