Bilge Karasu'nun Gece'sine metin ve okur odaklı bir yaklaşım

Abstract

Bilge Karasu (1930-1995), a prominent figure in Turkish literature, reached readers with his first novel Night (1985) after his exquisite short story books such as Troya’da Ölüm Vardı (1963), Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı (1970) and Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (1979). Night, which occupies a special place in the contemporary Turkish literature and among the author’s other works, was awarded the Pegasus Prize in 1991, but it has not been sufficiently studied and criticized until then. Because of its multi-layered structure, its style of handling the text-author-reader interaction, and its dissimilarity to traditional novels, the text has been labeled as “hard”. In this thesis, we carefully analyze in detail the “meta-fiction” and “fiction” frames in Night, as well as the connections between them, a task not undertaken earlier. We observe that because it interferes with the characters’ discourse, the discourse of the writer, which manifests itself at the meta-fiction level at the beginning of the text, becomes fictionalized and loses its authority. By means of handling the form and the content simultaneously, we also attempt to explain, how the reader is ushered into the text and how s/he is characterized there. The purpose of this thesis is not to present a definitive interpretation of the text, but to reveal its pattern of plural meanings within the framework of the writer-reader interaction. At the end of the thesis, we observe that the darkness, which has risen constantly in the first, second, and third sections of the text, has left itself to “night” at the last section. We understand that Night has a fictitious writer who produces a meta-discourse as he fictionalizes, and in the end, it breaks into pieces like a mirror fallen on the ground. The last words of the text, reveals and fictionalizes the “author” who sets up this “breaking into pieces”. This “author” employs the same techniques on his readers, which the “oppressors” narrated in the text use on others in order to pacify them. Therefore, the reader becomes a character of the text.