My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

"My name is" is a person adopting the characteristics of an identity. It works like "Call me Ishmael" at the beginning of Moby Dick, which Melville uses to identify in the protagonist the qualities of the biblical Ishmael (outcast, looking for truth in a wasteland). .
             A more recent example is the movie Gladiator when Russell Crowe (as Maximus Meridius) announces, "My name is Gladiator." He is adopting the persona of the faceless warrior to make a political and emotional point to the emperor and the public. "I am," on the other hand, doesn't play around with adoption or appropriation, "I am" is an announcement of form. A useful example is seen in Exodus at the burning bush. God's proclaims, "I am that I am", announcing that He encompasses all things and that all things together make up him. "I am Red" proclaims an identity far less ambitious, but equally resolute. .
             So Red begins by declaring itself, and the forcefulness of the declaration implies a certain character. That character is clarified in the next few sentences as we begin to see how a color operates and interacts with the representational world of miniature. Examining the verbs, the reader can immediately notice a theme of emergence. Instead of talk about being applied, as by a brush, we first are given phrases like "I appeared," "I became," and "I was there." These help clarify the image of Red as a persistent entity, the splashes of red on the page are iterative aspects of the same over-Red that existed before the illumination was drawn ("appeared") and will continue after it is finished ("I was there").
             While it's clear that Red in My Name is Red is a singular entity, two questions still remain. Namely: what does the Red identity do to art, and why does Orhan Pamuk include it as a concept? The first question can be answered by looking at the types of objects Red depicts.