Navigating Foreign Spaces: Selin’s Journey in Elif Batuman’s 'The Idiot' (2017)

This paper intends to explore the relationship between space and gender in Elif Batuman’s debut coming-of-age novel 'The Idiot' (2017). Set in the 1990s, the novel follows a year in the life of Selin Karadağ, a first-generation Turkish-American woman, who is a freshman studying linguistics at Harvard University. Whilst the first part of the novel is set in the university campus and is characterized by a sequence of loosely connected chronological episodes that see Selin meeting new people and taking different classes, the second part – which starts with the end of the school year – recounts Selin’s journey across Europe, as she travels to Paris, then to Budapest and the Hungarian countryside, and ends up in Turkey, in Antalya, where her Turkish relatives live. Part of the contemporary Turkish American literary tradition (Furlanetto 2017), 'The Idiot' does not simply recount the experience of a first-generation migrant who tries to balance two cultural traditions in U.S. territory (Walkowitz 2006, 531); more accurately, I intend to argue that the novel can be considered part of the American literary tradition of the ethnic Bildungsroman and, as such, it unsettles the conservative closure of the traditional (and European) Bildungsroman by 'challeng[ing] from various perspectives the developmental narrative of assimilation' (Bolaki 2011, 12-13). Selin’s inability to understand and decode the surrounding world never finds a solution and the relationship between herself and the people around her becomes even more complicated as the plot moves forward. In fact, as Townsend contends, Selin is ‘idiotic’ in the Dostoevskyan sense since she is independent and alien to ‘the traditional structures of “Western philosophy” and the mainstreams of European and North American culture’ (Townsend 2021, 1). Unable to bridge the gap between herself and society, between language and the world, by the end of the novel, she becomes severely depressed, and chooses to give up on her dreams as a writer. By examining the portrayal of space – namely, the campus and elitist academic life (hence, America in the eyes of a first-generation immigrant woman), and her unravelling journey across Europe – this paper intends to shed light on the nuanced relationship between female identity/vulnerability and self-discovery in the novel, contributing to deeper understandings of contemporary female Bildungsroman narratives.