Analysis on Oguz Atay's 'Tutunamayanlar' novel pursuant to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory

Since the past centuries to up until now, ontological anxieties have been a member of significant core problematics. It has been always a painful process for a human being to understand and make sense of his nature and realities. Sometimes the problems of distress, traumas, despair, death, etc. that people have experienced, turn into a vexed issue and become a dead end. Psychoanalysis has been a new and radical clinic approach and also has become the most comprehensive theory which provides groundbreaking explanations to these dead ends and root causes of them. According to the psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious is the secret power and essential source of human acts. The main way to approach this source is to release meanings beneath the discourses, which mean to release what has been disclosed by language. Hence explaining the unconscious dimension that literary texts inherit ensures a common area that resides at the root of both practices in terms of language. As a matter of fact, founder of psychoanalysis, Freud and his consecutives applied psychoanalytic method in their literary text analyses and executed the analytic analyses of texts belonging to writers such as Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. As Jacques Lacan described his theory as returning back to Freud and stated structure of unconscious as similar to the language and conducted analyses upon Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter in order to show psychoanalysis practice through literary texts. In this study, after providing essential scope of Freud's psychoanalytic theory to be able to explain epistemological structure of Lacan's psychoanalysis theory, the core concepts of Lacan's own unique theory have been explained. The existence metaphor within the Oğuz Atay's book named as 'Tutunamayanlar' discussed in the context of text and the characters of the text and explained pursuant to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. Analysis of unconscious images, belonging to aspects that constitute psyches of book characters, such as solidarity, meaninglessness, suicide, death, hopelessness, alienation, absurd have been applied through Lacan's theory.