A hotel; Is a place that harbors feelings of non-belonging, homelessness, and transience. The sense of place, which includes the meanings of the womb, home, dormitory, shelter, and ultimately permanence, creates a sharp contrast with this feeling given by the hotel. The hotel room not only hinders the strengthening of a person’s ties to life, but also weakens her/ sociality, but this independence also provides the person with the opportunity to open the doors of a space of freedom. In Yusuf Atılgan’s The Motherland Hotel and Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Lyin to Die, a hotel is an intermediate place where death and life decisions are given. Although the consciousness level of the two protagonists is different in the two works, the choice of the hotel as the place of suicide establishes a connection between defeat and rebellion in social, political, and individual phenomena. In Atılgan’s work, the hotel is cyclical as a space that is covered over itself, where the past is re-experienced in the most detailed way and the vital link is stuck in a whirlwind of meaninglessness. In Ağaoğlu’s work, reckoning with the past, the future is made and existence is tied to the feeling of hope given by the bond established with the 1968 generation. Suicide is therefore used as a symbol of mental transformation. In this article, primarily the attitudes and behaviors of the protagonists of the two works mentioned, the effect of the space on the fiction and theme, the semantic pattern evoked by suicide and the hotel are analyzed comparatively.
Yusuf Atılgan, Adalet Ağaoğlu, hotel, existentialism, suicide, sexuality.