Postmodern Subject and Narrative in Bilge Karasu's Novels Gece and Kilavuz

Abstract

Postmodernism is a phenomenon that arises against the holistic and systematic structure, normative patterns of classical and modern ways of thinking. It opposes traditional distinctions in both cultural and intellectual terms, conceptual presuppositions and judgments that form a hierarchy within themselves. Postmodernism parses reductive and single-centered class clusters, instead creating a polyphonic, marginal image of society. In the literary sense postmodernism tries to break precise sequences of meaning, fictional patterns that lack connotation. It destroys the god-like fictional dominance of the author, the two-dimensional structure of narrative subjects, the stereotyped narrative status quo. In postmodernism conventional dualities, fiction, and truth, extraordinary and ordinary, fake and truth, basis and margin collide with each other. Postmodernist writing in Western literature is the result of certain aesthetic innovations and processes developed against Modernism. However, in Turkish literature, art of novel reaches its artistic maturity at a later period. For this reason, modernist and postmodernist innovative aesthetic qualities appear together in some works. In Turkish literature, the postmodernist novel reaches its original and radical form in the 1980s and 1990s. Bilge Karasu, in this context, is one of the most important names in Turkish literature that includes the form of postmodernist writing and the dynamic characteristics of postmodern literature. His novels, Gece and the Kilavuz, are distinctive works that contain the postmodern narrative structure and subjects. The aim of this study is to examine the construction of postmodern subjectivity in Gece and Kilavuz, taking into account the qualities of postmodern writing.