Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 8 – YABAN, KADRO, ANKARA 
245 
nation to Yakup Kadri’s oedipal fixation which consistently identifies Atatürk with 
Moses or the Messiah
13
. Azade Seyhan draws attention to the ebb and flow of Ahmet 
Celal’s emotions and the ambivalence of his discourse in order to point out quoting 
Milan Kundera that the novel’s function is to show, that “things are not as simple 
you think” and to offer a critical insight into the conditions and limits of forging 
national consciousness
14
. 
A good start for an understanding of the novel would be in Yakup Kadri’s own 
words about it. It “appeared in order to express the same heartache in a greater 
measure”
15
. The heartache is the shame he felt comparing the comfort in which he 
travelled in 1921 with the condition after the devastation of war of the villagers. 
“Under these clean, comfortable and soft covers, we have our skin swarming and 
inflicted by many kinds of disease called Suspicion, Pride, Conceit and Greed. The 
hatred and savagery of the enemy come and gone over you like a plague, but we 
carry that red, that savagery, that enemy always within us”
16
. The three or four 
month nightmare that Yakup Kadri had spent in 1921 “lived constantly for ten years 
in my subconscious. You understand that this work is something virtually ripped and 
torn by itself from the depths of my being
17
. 
Yakup Kadri could not have made it more obvious that the work expresses the 
deepest personal feelings. His own words remind the reader of what Halide Edip said 
of his “Ateşten Gömlek”: that it came from within him. 
Yaban 
has moments of the 
13
Parla 2007, 16-17 
14
Seyhan, 56-64 
15
Jacobson, xvii 
16
Jacobson, xvi 
17
Jacobson, xvii 

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