Malevolent-children in modern Turkish short story

Abstract

“Evil” is considered to be an equivalent word for “virtueless” that is a meaningful form in society and defined by the words "bad, wicked, awful" etc. When this lack of virtue, which is often brought up by the humanities, is considered within the framework of morality, children who have not yet been involved in society’s taming game appear on the stage. They are also included in various types of fiction in literature, in their semi-tamed state, something social perception is very familiar with, hidden under the epithet “innocent”. Whereas works depicting this state of the child in world literature are placed under the title “evil in literature”, there is no such title and classification in Turkish Literature. All kinds of evil can be found in Turkish literary works, as well as “malevolent, bad, semi-domesticated children”. In this study, it will be discussed by focusing on how and why the concept of “evil and the child” is dealt with in a historical context in the modern Turkish short story, and revealing the existence of this situation, sometimes aestheticizing and sometimes instrumentalizing the evil act, as a child or children the perpetrator in the fiction. To be able to do this, I started the work with theoretical readings on the concept of evil and malevolent children before deciding the stories to be addressed and giving a thought on their political, psychological, and social contexts. Based on this, stories that clearly relate these contexts to the concepts of children and evil have been selected. As the study proceeds within this outline, the main discussion will move on to how evil is represented in the narrative by child character[s] and how these representations are included in the narrative, at what times, in what ways they are aestheticized or instrumentalized for what, and this discussion will form the main part of the study. In order to illustrate this, representations of evil will be analyzed according to a classification based on victims in twenty-two stories that are determined through literature review, that are Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar's “Nasıl Öldürdüler?”, Orhan Kemal's “Köpek Yavrusu”, Pınar Kür's “Son Çizgi”, Ömer Seyfettin's “İlk Cinayet”, “Falaka” and "Acıklı Bir Hikâye”, Sait Faik Abasıyanık's “Son Kuşlar”, “İzmir’e” and “Bohça”, Onat Kutlar's “Kül Kuşları”, Sema Kaygusuz's “Engereğin Oğlu”, Reşat Nuri Güntekin's “Hasta Çocuk”, “Kol Saati” and “Çocuk Kavgası”, Mine Söğüt's “Naz Neden Derine Gömmemiş Kediyi?”, Sabahattin Ali's “Ayran”, Bekir Yildiz's “Demir Bebek”, Leyla Erbil's “Diktatör”, Yusuf Atılgan's “Tutku”, Vüs’at O. Bener's “İlki” and “Havva” stories, and the malevolent children in the modern Turkish short story will be revealed.