Varoluşun Alt Sınırı: Zeyyat Selimoğlu’nun “Ayı” ve İlhan Tarus’un “Karabaş ile Mahmud” Öykülerinde İnsanın Hayvanlaşması

In the short stories of Zeyyat Selimoğlu and İlhan Tarus, animal figures transcend their traditional symbolic meanings to become constitutive elements that push or render visible the existential boundaries of the human experience. This article demonstrates that in Zeyyat Selimoğlu's story “Ayı” (“The Bear”) and İlhan Tarus's “Karabaş ile Mahmud” (“Karabaş and Mahmud”), the concepts of “becoming-animal” (assuming an animal identity) and “animalization” (exhibiting animal qualities within human form) function as foundational narrative devices. These processes reveal the individual's suppressed impulses, search for belonging and identity, internal ruptures, and modes of survival through identification with animals. In Selimoğlu's story, this process of becoming-animal is shaped around the axes of the sea, the ship, and the act of naming, within the context of adaptation to natural conditions, securing belonging, gaining resilience, and forms of bodily and spiritual defense. In Tarus’s work, the qualities manifesting as animalization through hunger, deprivation, loss of identity, scent and conscience serve a fictional function that expresses the dissolution caused by social exclusion. In “Ayı”, the animal character transforms into an armor that conceals the individual's suppressed power, capacity for resistance, and fragility, whereas in Karabaş ile Mahmud, it becomes an indicator of the desperation in which the individual is imprisoned and a sphere of emotional representation for the communication the individual fails to establish or has lost. This article attempts to illustrate how the boundaries between human and animal become blurred and transform into a permeable structure, reshaped according to social, spatial, and psychological conditions.