The Tragic as an Ironic (Im)possibility in Orhan Pamuk’s Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8028762Keywords:
The tragic, Orhan Pamuk, Turkish literature, Turkish modernity, ironyAbstract
This article examines how the tragic is configured and later ironically subverted in Orhan Pamuk’s first novel Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları. By focusing particularly on how one of the main protagonists Refik’s story is narrated, this article analyzes the relationship between his existential crisis, his quest for meaning, his failure, and the configuration of the tragic in the novel. The analysis of the novel concentrates on the existential and ideological aspects of Refik’s crisis and how this crisis is ironically connected to Turkish modernity. This article first analyzes why and how Refik’s existential angst and his sense of failure are represented as inevitable, both of which are linked to Turkey’s secular nationalist modernization. Second, it scrutinizes how irony is mockingly used in this representation and how this use negates the tragic in Refik’s story, which is closely related to the socio-historical context of Westernizing Turkey in the 1930s.
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