Masculine Melancholia in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s “Yalnız Kalmak Korkusu”

This article examines how Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s 1914 short story “Yalnız Kalmak Korkusu” (“Fear of Being Alone”) stages a crisis of masculine subjectivity as a problem of narrative form. Although critics have often read the story through the lens of European literary influence, particularly through that of Guy de Maupassant, this article moves beyond such readings by foregrounding the formal contradictions that structure the narrative. Drawing on Philip G. Hadlock’s conception of masculine melancholia, a structural condition built into how gendered identity is narrated in patriarchal culture, I argue that the story illustrates not a failure of masculine coherence, but the impossibility of its narrative resolution. Through a close reading of the protagonist’s inability to name his psychological condition, his fantasy of being stabilized in language, and the projection of incoherence onto a woman, I show how the story both exposes and conceals the melancholic structure of masculinity. Rather than signaling derivativeness, the story’s affinities with Maupassant mark a shared literary-epistemological impasse in which narration becomes the site of a masculinity that cannot narrate itself coherently. I reposition Yakup Kadri’s short story as a compelling example of modern Ottoman/Turkish fiction’s confrontation of masculinity as both a thematic and formal crisis. In this light, the short story can be read alongside a broader constellation of modern Ottoman/Turkish literary texts that grapple with the contradictions of masculinity as a formal condition of narration itself.