‘The Sentence Cannot Hold’: Language and Legality in Yusuf Atılgan's Anayurt Oteli

In this paper I will be tracing the concept of sentence in Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli written in 1973, one of the most prominent examples of late modernist novels written in Turkish. I aim to primarily look at the rhetorical use of everyday as well as legal language in the narrative that marks the impossibility of agreement between the protagonist Zebercet and his surroundings. Starting with the violent nature of language as means for communication, I will delve into the limits of the expressive capacity of characters in the novel. I also plan to inquire what ethical possibility the narrative might open up to its reader by problematizing the understandability of ‘the other.’ I will argue that such an ethical concern about ‘the other’ would, eventually, induce the reader to question the ‘binding’ nature of the everyday communication that was taken for granted up until modernism.