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CHAPTER 5 – TWO SHIRTS OF FLAME 
165 
Halide Edip’s 
Ateşten Gömlek 
is a novel of 267 pages in its English version from 
which citations will be made here. In form it is a narration of a love triangle set 
chronologically between the Moudros Armistice in October 1918 and the Greek 
retreat at the end of the Battle of Sakarya in September 1921. The narrator reveals 
himself at the beginning to be a war invalid lying in an Ankara hospital with both 
legs amputated. He has a bullet lodged in his brain, which there will shortly be an 
attempt to remove by surgery. The narration purports to be a set of entries in a 
notebook which are dated between 3
rd
November and 15
th
December. As in 
Güntekin’s 
Çalıkuşu
, the year is not indicated but here it is obvious from the 
narrative that it must be 1921 because the Battle of Sakarya has happened some 
months before and the reconquest of İzmir is still in the future. 
At once, the formal similarity to 
Yaban, 
which is also presented as a first person 
narration recorded in a notebook, is obvious. Another formal similarity is the use of a 
framing device. In Halide Edip’s 
Ateşten Gömlek 
it is at the very end, with an unseen 
narrator relating a discussion of the notebook, after its owner has died on the 
operating table, between two doctors. In 
Yaban
it is at the beginning, where the 
members of a delegation for the recording of the war atrocities in Anatolia find 
among the ruins of a village the half-burnt notebook. In both novels the content of 
the framing device also undercuts the narration which it frames. In 
Ateşten Gömlek
the doctors say that enquiries have shown that the people mentioned in the 
deceased’s notebook did not exist; they assume that the whole story was a 
hallucination caused by the bullet lodged in his brain. In the very last sentence of the 
book the doctors give a Latin name to the narrator’s “Shirt of Flame”, as if
 
it is an 

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