The unbearable heaviness of being: absurdity of everyday life in Yusuf Atılgan's Aylak Adam and Julio Cortazar's Rayuela

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2311612_ (Table of contents)

This thesis focuses on the theme of absurdity within the quotidian boundaries of life in Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam and Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (translated as Hopscotch into English and Sek Sek into Turkish). Despite the linguistic, political, and social differences in the novels’ backgrounds, striking similarities appear between the two protagonists— Aylak Adam’s C and Rayuela’s Horacio Oliveira. Both of these twentieth century literary characters are deeply affected by Existentialism in their conceptions of the world, or more specifically, of what is called everyday life. The shared notion of both is that accepting societal norms and abiding by the status quo is what makes each individual’s life similar to the others’; in other words, to live like everybody else is to forgo one’s individuality. For this reason, social institutions or acts such as marriage, having children, and/or working at a job turn life into a vicious, repetitive cycle, consequently rendering it absurd. I pay particular attention to C’s idleness as an act of resistance to this uniformity, and how Cortázar’s Oliveira, in a similar way, prioritizes his intellectual pursuits over social expectations. By making a comparative analysis of both works and eventually exploring how the existentialist flâneur perceives everyday life as absurd while he struggles to escape from habit, I aim to show how a Turkish and an Argentinian novel with completely different backgrounds can intersect through a universal anguish: existential dread.