Point of View

The point of view of The Black Book is third-person limited narration. The narrator follows the thoughts and feeling of Galip, the protagonist, and it is later revealed that Galip himself is the narrator. Storytelling is an important theme in the novel, and Galip as the narrator is telling the story of his search for his wife. This results in the occasional first-person commentary from Galip as narrator during the course of the novel.

Every other chapter is a newspaper article written for The Milliyet, a Turkish newspaper, most often in the first-person. Jelal, Galip’s cousin, is the writer of the majority of them. Galip never interacts with Jelal in the main plot of the novel, so the articles are glimpses into Jelal’s personality outside of Galip’s limited narration. Jelal’s articles are a combination of fiction stories, interviews, and his own...