Deconstructing the Binary of Victim and Perpetrator in Hakan Gunday’s More

Abstract

Poststructuralism’s insistence on the instability of meaning, which enables the deconstruction of hierarchical binaries like presence/absence, speech/writing, and purity/impurity, can similarly be used to interrogate and unsettle the victim/perpetrator binary. This study deconstructs the binary of victim/perpetrator in Hakan Günday’s novel More (Daha) through a close textual analysis using Derridean concept of deconstruction. While the novel appears to present a clear moral division between exploited immigrants and the traffickers who control them, Günday’s narrative is prone to destabilizing this opposition. The protagonist Gaza occupies both positions simultaneously: he is victimized by his father’s violence and the structural brutality of border economies, yet he becomes a perpetrator within the same system. This oscillation exposes the instability of moral categories that rely on purity, intentionality, and fixed identity. By foregrounding taboo violence, marginal subjectivities, and the hidden economies of human trafficking, More exemplifies underground fiction—literature that operates beneath official cultural narratives and reveals what state, society, and mainstream aesthetics suppress. The analysis demonstrates that the victim/perpetrator binary collapses under the novel’s internal contradictions, revealing harm as a relational, recursive, and structurally produced phenomenon. Ultimately, the study argues that Günday’s work not only critiques the politics of borders and migration but also exposes the aporetic foundations of moral judgment itself.