Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Öz

Yiğit Bener’s last novel Acı Portakal [Bitter Orange] reads like a sequel to his first novel Eksik Taşlar [Missing Stones] due to the frames of reference (or lack of them) and parallelisms in the narrative. The novel is based on three things: an unnamed father’s confrontation with his daughter (or the integration of the exiled father in Amsterdam with the unnamed father in İstanbul), the second father’s cleansing of his guilty conscience through a confrontation with a woman he hurt in the past, through his narrative, thus, his liberating himself from a traumatic incident that imprisons him in the past, and finally this unnamed father’s reaction to the concept of violence and its different representations in society through both of the narratives. In this essay, the sense of rootlessness and how it is dealt with by two of the fathers will be explored consulting the concept of anomie by Durkheim. In light of the fathers’ views on women’s rights and violence, the essay also discusses how they can offer a new alternative to the established system though their living practice. Due to the parallelisms between Bener’s first and last novels, the essay also compares this unnamed father to Erdinç, the protagonist of Bener’s first novel, to highlight the similarities between them and to what extent the unnamed father could go beyond the impasse of Erdinç in his living practice.