In this article, Oğuz Atay’s diary, which he kept from April 25, 1970, to January 9, 1977, and published in 1987 after his death, is analyzed. How Atay constructs the tension between personal-social/cultural, private-public categories in the Günlük, which consists of social, cultural, and literary evaluations and criticisms rather than his daily routines, observations, and private and ordinary feelings, is examined. In the fictiveness in question, how Atay’s construction of self and how this construction is related to the social/cultural one, is discussed. How Oğuz Atay’s diary, which describes the personal experience in social/cultural and public contexts, creates a matrix in the past-present-future system in all these areas, is focused. In the tense relationship between the intersections of this matrix, it is tried to show how the option of reconciliation is left to the future with the unity with the self-construction by the author and the world around him. Ultimately, the article claims that the diary genre is used in Turkish literature as a means of self-constructing for a common worldview or as a protest of the irreconcilable reality. In addition, he argues through Oğuz Atay’s diary that the genre is a unique and unchangeable feature of the genre, as it is the basis for the individual’s self-construction, as well as being a means of directing the discussion of social/cultural construction to an uncertain readership in the future. In addition, it argues through Oğuz Atay’s Günlük that it is the unique and unchangeable feature of the genre that it is a means of directing the discussion of social/cultural construction to an uncertain future audience as much as it is the ground for the individual to construct himself.

Oğuz Atay, diary, criticism, self construction, social construction, cultural construction.