Linguistically constructed worlds: A comparative analysis

Our lives are composed of big or small stories. People, who are born to these stories, unconsciously accept both the prevailing the "big stories" they are subjected to and the "small stories" they themselves tell as reality. This collectively accepted reality, which is constructed via language, is actually a composite of "big stories" told by the powerful elites. Since power shifts from one group to another through time, what is accepted as reality also changes historically, making the reality of one period falseness at another time. The fact that the ones who hold the power in their hands have changed throughout history results in the emergence and acceptance of different realities in different times. This dissertation aims at analyzing the processes and results of the engulfment of the small stories of the protagonists by the socially constructed big stories in the Canadian author, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and the Turkish novelist, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute) against the narratives of these characters who finally manage to tell their stories, hence their own versions of reality. That both these novels underline the constructedness of reality and demonstrate the constant competition among different versions of these realities lies at the core of this dissertation. These novels indicate how those individuals who cannot cope with this competition disappear along with their stories. In this dissertation, the foregrounding of small stories in these two novels has been interpreted as an effort of raising awareness about many other small stories and hence realities.