Narrator's play: weaving voice and silence in perperik-a söe and hawara Dicleye

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1648985 (Table of Contents)

This study aims to explore how the narrators in the literary accounts of catastrophic experience whereby the survivor or the victim faces a loss –the loss of law of mourning as well as a loss of the capacity to narrate that loss– weave the literary word in pursuit of voices or through silence. Closely investigating how voice and silence are tailored in the fictional narratives in which authors strive to find a “voice” for the unspeakable, this study aims to scrutinize the ways in which the narrators play with voice and silence in two particular novels– The Voice of the Tigris and The Nocturnal Butterfly in order to engage in an act of remembering the past that is replete with the memories of the catastrophe. It tries to understand how voice, already absent in writing as claimed by the long-established discussions on voice in writing, as well as silence is re-written in such texts with a view to comprehending the capacity of art to liberate the voice. If speech or voice is already absent or lost as in the case of traumas or the catastrophic experience, how does writing narrate what is already absent? How does the narrative voice, as a narratological element, inscribe the silence in and on a ground that has come to be associated with the absence of voice?