One prominent theme in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is sight and its opposite: blindness. These two terms each have certain connotations depending on the context and who is speaking about them throughout the novel. In class, we noted that Master Osman scrapes away the eyes in some paintings since eyes can symbolically connote individuality and uniqueness of an artist’s lens and the subject of their depiction (321).

Many characters explain the Eastern theory that the masters among the miniaturists should be able to go blind from their strenuous work and still be able to depict things in Allah’s perspective due to their memory and the imbedded nature of the craft, which they’ve done for so long. Some like Olive, in his Three Stories on Blindness and Memory, go as far to say that blindness actually helps them in seeing this: “‘Since my eyes will no longer be distracted by the filth of this world, I’ll be able to depict all the glories of Allah from memory, in their purest form'”(77).

I wonder if you could see this idea of blindness in a reverse perspective – while allowing miniaturists to focus on Allah’s perspective and the craft they’ve trained themselves to know, it also disables them from seeing anything outside of that. As it’s typically thought of in the Western perspective, blindness is restrictive. And if Master Osman ultimately tries to blind himself because he wishes to see in concepts, then he is also allowing himself to not be tempted by any other possibly contradictory perspectives. In the Eastern perspective pushed by certain characters in the book, there is a power to limiting the extent of the world that you can see (and deem as important) through physical blindness and selective memory.