Understanding the Absurd Inside

Abstract

Lost in a basement, or locked up in himself, a man contemplates the horror of his scandalous life. The more he struggles to see, the more he becomes ridiculous. His hatred grows of his inability to exist as a complete being. Anyone who sees Zeki Demirkubuz’s Yeraltı (Inside) would be struck by his antihero character Muharrem who is coupled with the absurd. This is a socially frustrated individual who seems to defend the irrational and the absurd instead of the rational and commonsensical ideas of his age. For the spectator, the question of empathy arises at this level: How is an identification in empathy with an antihero possible? This study aims to assess the possibility of identification in empathy with another self through Demirkubuz’s character Muharrem, inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground, by taking the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s article The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions as the reference point. Following Dilthey’s thesis, we will argue that what seems contrary to commonsense and self-contradictory can be read and understood within an existentialist framework. This framework is presented by underlining some major paradoxes in Muharrem’s way of thinking and behaving when facing the universal nothingness devoid of God.

Keywords

• zeki demirkubuz
• inside
• absurd
• dilthey
• identification