Gaziantep Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi

Öz

Since the early twentieth century, when psychoanalytic theory began to exert its influence on literary art, authors who felt compelled to more transparently reflect the inner world of the individual started to develop various narrative techniques. The stream of consciousness technique, as one of the clearest indicators of the reflection of psychoanalysis on modern literature, stands out as a narrative technique that has been frequently used by writers since this period. In world literature, the earliest and most exemplary instances of this technique were provided by authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka, while in Turkish literature its first authentic manifestation appeared in the works of Oğuz Atay in 1970’s. Subsequently, through writers like Adalet Ağaoğlu, Bilge Karasu, and Orhan Pamuk, this technique increasingly became a favored method among authors who center the individual’s inner world in their narratives. Bekir Yıldız is an important writer who has left his mark on Turkish literature, revealing the life of the people of Southeastern Anatolia and the problems of the workers who migrated to Germany in a very striking way through his stories written in a socialist realist style. With his novel Halkalı Köle, first published in 1980, Bekir Yıldız departs from his customary narrative style by centering his work on a marriage he was unable to terminate due to legal obstacles, thereby offering an intriguing autobiographical example in Turkish literature. This study examines the intensive use of the stream-of-consciousness technique in Bekir Yıldız’s Halkalı Köle and analyzes its effect on the novel’s thematic structure.