A Comparative Approach to Fictions Named Malone Dies and Lying Down to Die

This paper argues that the novels called contemporary Turkish woman writer Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Lying Down to Die (1973) and English writer Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1950) have significant intertextual similarities to each other as texts of postmodern fiction. When compared and contrasted in terms of comparative literature Lying Down to Die also is within a network of references to, quotations from, and plagiarisms of Malone Dies, and every text is an intersection of others as forms and contents.Ağaoğlu’s novel has some postmodern and intertextual characteristics such as form and content with English writer Beckett’s fiction. Aysel, an old woman waiting for her death in her bed in a hotel room, like Malone who almost is unable due to an illness in a hospital room, asylum, mental hospital, a shelter or simple a space in his mind, his body doesn't respond anymore, the parts of his body doesn't work. Both characters also think about past, moment and future, writes, waits for death from similar perspectives although one is a woman, the other is a man. This study explores that the characters mark out the thin line between life or death, question their existence, play with readers by ironic expressions, in terms of comparative literature.