A study on the novels of Faruk Duman in terms of modernist fiction

Each era's perspective on life, humanity, and perception of reality directly reflects the artistic understanding of that particular time period. Literary works produced in the 19th century, which focused on reality and relied on reason and the concrete, are closed-structured texts with a definite beginning and end. The novel's form-content structure, providing definitive answers to questions of where, when, how, and why, aligns with the era's understanding of reality. Novelists of the era narrate events in a chronological order, adhering to the order of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The era's realist novel appears to be an extension of Newtonian physics in literary aesthetics. New scientific developments, gaining momentum in the early 20th century, cast doubt on the fundamental principles of Newtonian physics, along with the determinism that had marked the understanding of reality for the past several centuries. Scientific determinations based on certainty and immutability, based on cause-and-effect relationships, gradually gave way to a new naturalistic trend driven by concepts of uncertainty, probability, and relativity. This new understanding of reality also finds its reflection in 20th-century aesthetics. In the early years of the 20th century, archetypes, evocative of symbols found in dreams or fortune-telling outside the boundaries of the previous era's understanding of reality, became the most important components of human reality. The writer now constructs journeys of memory/consciousness devoid of thematic unity, on a grotesque/abstract plane, outside of cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, the traditional aesthetics that presented the outside world as it is, grounded in concrete reality, also came to an end. 20th-century modernist artists were also artists of alienation. The most significant point distinguishing this new literature from traditional literature is that it does not aim to educate or guide individuals and society. In the modernist novel, characters journey not on concrete geography but on the interconnected plane of the inner world. In this new fictional world, where the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds are blurred, the tendency towards the spiritual, the mysterious realms of the soul, the metaphysical, mythology, and imaginary products increases. In this new world order, where individual autonomy is so crucial, the collective consciousness is marginalized, and traditions and customs are largely challenged. In the modernist novel, individuals living in their own subjective worlds become isolated as a consequence of their alienation from shared values. Based on these approaches, our thesis examines seven novels by Faruk Duman (b. 1974), a post-1990 writer whose stories and novels adhere to the modernist literary approach. Faruk Duman, who began his literary career with short stories, later gained recognition with his novels. Natural elements, oral traditions, fairytale elements, and fantastical atmospheres play a significant role in the author's works. While incorporating elements of oral narrative originating from folk culture, he utilizes the possibilities of modern short stories and novels to reinterpret the traditional in a contemporary form. With his unique narrative styles and refined, simple language, the author holds a unique position among contemporary writers. Our thesis examines seven of Faruk Duman's novels, which offer a wealth of noteworthy material within the field of modern literary understanding, using textual analysis. Our thesis consists of three chapters, excluding the Introduction and Conclusion. The first section examines the emergence and development of the modernist novel in Turkish and world literature. The second section provides information on Faruk Duman's life, art, and works. The third section, taking into account the values discussed in the first two sections, comprehensively examines the author's novels under subheadings in terms of themes reflecting modernist fiction. Given that no previous thesis has been written on Faruk Duman's novels from a modernist fiction perspective, and that the articles reviewed do not cover all of his novels and focus on specific elements, our study aims to contribute to the literature with its unique value.