Written in the form of a quest novel with mysterious and paradoxical traits, The Black Book is widely categorized as ＂postmodern fiction.＂ However, unlike most postmodern novels which thwart every attempt to search for meaning and self-knowledge, The Black Book does not dismiss the protagonist's detection as a total failure. In the search for his disappeared wife and cousin Celal, Galip, the protagonist, rereads the old columns and at the end of the story he retells the ancient tales. In his rereading and retelling of the story he becomes someone else, and in his becoming someone else he finds a way to be himself. Taking Gilles Deleuze's notions of repetition and apprenticeship, in this paper I argue that repetition in this story is not simply a postmodern device to confuse readers or to create illusionary effects, but a thread weaving Galip's apprenticeship, that is, a continuous process of learning. In Deleuze's sense, repetition must be understood in terms of relation, and The Black Book illustrates exactly how repetition signifies relations between individuals. In repeating Celal's every step, Galip transforms and changes himself, and each change actualizes a relation between the knowing subject and the known individual.
