A Literary Semiotic Analysis of Samipaşazade Sezai’s Short Story “Kediler”

Abstract

Recognized as one of the pioneers of modern storytelling in Turkish literature, Samipaşazade Sezai, especially with his work Küçük Şeyler (Little Things), wrote short stories that reflect the individual’s inner world and the seemingly ordinary phenomena of daily life through an artistic style. The primary aim of this study is to analyze the short story “Kediler” within the framework of literary semiotics and to reveal the multilayered universe of meaning in the text. In this study, semiotics is not only approached as a method but also as a theoretical perspective that makes visible the formal, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of the text while actively involving the reader in the process of interpretation. Accordingly, the descriptive, narrative, and thematic levels of meaning have been examined separately, and the formation of the universe of meaning in the text has been revealed. In this process, “Kediler” has been treated as an independent universe of meaning; the thematic roles of the characters, together with the relations of time and space, have been evaluated in the context of literary semiotics. As a result, this study highlights Küçük Şeyler as an analysis that clarifies its position in the modernization process of Turkish short story writing. At the same time, the analysis contributes both theoretically and practically to the application of literary semiotic methods in the study of literary texts. The analyses revealed that the story “Kediler” has a multi-layered structure; through analyses conducted at the descriptive, narrative, and thematic levels, the deeper layers of meaning in the text were uncovered. It was also determined that Samipaşazade Sezai rendered the individual’s inner world visible by treating the seemingly ordinary elements of everyday life in a symbolic style.