The unreliable guards of morality : Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s ambivalent narrative universe
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Date
2023
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2023.
Abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to reposition Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar in Turkish literature by showing the narrative techniques that he employs to undermine prominent social codes and discourses, especially morality. Most of the studies have associated the author with the tradition of Ahmet Mithat, and wiewed him as a writer who writes to educate the public through his most striking feature, moralism. This critical attitude turns into an effort to read his texts by adapting them to certain ideologies, and at the points where the text contradicts these ideologies, researchers try to explain this situation with the inadequacy of the author's technique. I will challenge these established judgments in this dissertation. I will primarily focus on his novels Gönül Bir Yeldeğirmenidir Sevda Öğütür (1922), Ben Deli Miyim (1924), Kaderin Cilvesi (1925) and Kokotlar Mektebi (1927) written after World War I. The common feature of these novels is that they have an unreliable first-person narrator. Besides unreliable narrator, the carnivalesque elements formed by the combination of the incongruities causes the ambivalent moral universe to be destroyed while it is being established, and no value left intact in his novels. In addition to successful dialogues, the frequent use of different narrative types such as letters and newspapers creates a polyphonic atmosphere which results in narratives where different ideas chase each other, and their meanings get lost. (See the Appendix for an extended abstract.)