Samuel Beckett'in üç oyununda zihni mekânlar semiyotiğin semboliğe zorla girişi

This thesis examines the intrusion of the abjected semiotic into the symbolic in Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. A survey of studies in drama finds that the recent spatial turn has largely ignored spaces of drama, and that the current state of spatial criticism alone cannot adequately explain spaces in the drama of Beckett. Spatial binarism and the imagery of death, being relevant in these plays, are used as the initial steps for investigating psychic spatiality in the drama of Beckett and provide the analytical tools of this thesis. Furthermore, these elements of the plays also repeatedly demonstrate the very concerns that Kristeva refers to in her theory of the symbolic, the semiotic and abjection. According to Kristeva, the subject-to-be becomes a subject in the symbolic and the semiotic no longer exists after the thetic break. There may still be, however, vestiges or residues of the semiotic that may appear as abjected elements such as death. The hypothesis of this thesis is that in the aforementioned plays Beckett shows the intrusion of the abjected semiotic into the symbolic, and this is done through the following three steps: firstly, a spatial binarism is created between the onstage and offstage spaces at the beginning of each play; secondly, gradual information is provided through language and actions of the characters about the offstage space that is depicted with images of death throughout the plays; thirdly, the imagery of death or the abjected semiotic initially abjected to the offstage space intrudes into the onstage space and the order in the onstage space is broken at the end of each play. Therefore, it is suggested that, in the drama of Beckett, the abjected semiotic intrudes into the symbolic but that this has no outcome, because the symbolic cannot deal with these abjected semiotic vestiges. Keywords: Beckett, the semiotic, the symbolic, abjection, psychic space