Yeni Türk Edebiyatı Araştırmaları

Abstract

Güven Turan, better known as a poet in Turkish literature in the 1960s, is a
versatile artist with his novels, stories and criticisms. His work Dalyan, published
in 1978, won the Turkish Language Association Novel Prize. Turan, who succeeded
in making a name for himself with his novelism in literary circles with this work,
processes the inner world, psychological problems, alienation, and search for
identity within the possibilities of the modern novel in an existential style. He
became one of the innovative names of his time by building his understanding of
art on modern literature. The author, who emphasizes male-female relationships,
prefers concepts such as love, sexuality, existence, loneliness, and death as the
main themes of his works.
In this study, it was examined how and to what extent the search for identity
within the framework of social variables, psychological conditions and male-female
relationship is touched on an existential level in Güven Turan’s Dalyan novel.
The methodology utilized existentialism and psychoanalytic criticism, provided
that Soren Kierkegaard’s self-concept was at the center. Based on the data
obtained, it has been observed that the struggle for existence and the search
for identity are designed around issues such as memory, death, fear, and conscience-
intent conflict in a modernist method.