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CHAPTER 5 – TWO SHIRTS OF FLAME 
178 
and by erasing everything had been narrated so far, Halide Edip wants to put forward 
the idea that the struggle was not one hero’s act but the collective act of unnamed 
heroes and he calls the ending ironic
26
. The difficulty with this interpretation is that if 
the whole of Peyami’s narrative is a hallucination, the hallucination includes the 
National struggle as well as İhsan and Ayşe.
All these interpretations seem not to take account of one obvious fact: that in the very 
last paragraph the now independent narrator tells us that Peyami really had a Shirt of 
Flame. In a footnote to her translation of the prefatory letter to Yakup Kadri Halide 
Edip tells the reader what “The Shirt of Flame” is
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: it “is an idiomatic expression 
among Turkish people meaning great suffering which one does not try to get rid of 
even if one has the power”.
The narrator is consequently telling us that Peyami really underwent this suffering. 
By also telling us that the doctors gave “a difficult Latin name to his Shirt of Flame” 
the narrator is treating the doctors not the Shirt of Flame ironically. How could there 
be a real Shirt of Flame but no Ayşe or İhsan? The simplest answer is that Peyami’s 
passion for the national cause is meant to be understood as akin to an erotic passion 
which in his hallucination is transmuted into a passion for a woman, specifically the 
ideal woman of Smyrna
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.
26
Binyazar, 55 
27
Adıvar 1924, xix, footnote 1 
28
Not Anatolia generally as in Jale Parla’s interpretation. 

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CHAPTER 5 – TWO SHIRTS OF FLAME 
179 
It makes sense in this light that the novel presents not a hallucinated but a realistic 
history of the War of Independence, as Halide Edip herself repeatedly points out in 
the footnotes to the English edition. It starts in Istanbul at the time of the Armistice 
of 1918 where the narrator Peyami meets his cousin Cemal and through him İhsan. 
With the introduction of the characters the reader is immediately introduced to the 
different worlds which set the Kurtuluş narrative in motion; in one contrast we see 
the two conflicting worlds of the treacherous Europeanised Turks who are set against 
the traditional and courteous Muslims. Epitomising the former is Peyami’s mother 
who “was a Europeanised middle-aged woman in the European quarter of Şişli”.
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. 
When he eventually leaves for Anatolia she strongly disapproves. “I pray to Allah 
that thy heart may ever burn, thy life may ever pass in longing and regret!”
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İhsan , Cemal and Peyami are involved in propaganda organisations and try to 
defend their country’s rights. Any pro-Turkish publication was heavily censored 
and
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:
The more we felt the strength and the righteousness of our cause, the 
more we felt that the world must already know this. Perhaps this was the 
only beautiful part of this childish and subjective propaganda. For to 
suffer what we had suffered and to be able to throw ourselves into the 
voluntary martyrdom of our great war of Independence we needed first 
and most to be convinced and to believe in ourselves. 
One part of Istanboul lived on, rotten and pessimistic, while the other