Saroyan’s “The Black Tartars”: Frame Narrative, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing

This article offers an examination of William Saroyan’s stance on nationalism through the analysis of “The Black Tartars” (1936), a story built on the technique of embedding which shows, through the layering of stories, two distinct models: one based upon primordialist notions of race; the other resting on the principle of ethnolinguistic homogeneity and resulting in the birth of the modern nation-state. By examining the dialogicity implicit in the frame narrative, I propose to examine Karachi’s tale as an example of “parodic skaz” which stands at odd with the author’s ideology and operates as a concave mirror reflection of the tragic fate hovering over stateless minorities.