Oğuz Atay, a ?Strange?, against the system and the woman

One of the most important authors of the 20th Century Modern Turkish novel, Oğuz Atay's (1934-1977) works have not so far been taken into consideration in light of gender-focused literary analysis as a whole. In this thesis, I argue that the male characters in Oğuz Atay's fiction, who stand up against the patriarchal system, are in fact in conformity with the status quo when exhibiting a repressive attitude against women. In the course of the project, analyses on author's Tutunamayanlar, Tehlikeli Oyunlar, Oyunlarla Yaşayanlar and short stories titled ?Unutulan? and ?Beyaz Mantolu Adam? in Korkuyu Beklerken are presented. Dominance of male voice in the subject-matter literary works seem to stand as obstacles in reaching female voice. As a reading strategy for this specific context, the theory of ?polyphonic novel? of Mikhail Bakhtin's is employed. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, voice is a medium that expresses not only ?timber? but also consciousness. For a literary work to count as embedding ?polyphonic?, characters are to have representations of consciousness that are independent of both the author, the ?meta-narrator?, and each other. Given the emphasis by certain feminist theorists that Bakhtin's theory could be employed for gender-focused literary analysis, marginalization of female consciousness in Oğuz Atay's works is discussed. Means of the alleged marginalization is revealed by how male characters otherize female characters in the fictional worlds of Oğuz Atay's. In order to give an account for this analysis, two pioneers of the French school of feminism, Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray?s stance on the dialectic of the I and the other is associated with Oğuz Atay's literary works. Regarding the short stories, the literary analysis rather focuses on the cases in which female characters, even when situated as the narrator of the fiction, cannot have an independent voice, and on the destructive character of gender roles. In another chapter, the question of how bourgeois tendencies are affiliated with married female characters in Oğuz Atay's literary works is addressed. Final remarks of the thesis are on how the married female characters of Atay's fictional worlds are situated in the hierarchy of social classes within the narrations, when Marxist and feminist approaches are in question.Keywords: Oğuz Atay, Mikhail Bakhtin, polyphony, feminism