ABSTRACT
Continually passing in front of his eyes was Kel Hamza's elongated, saffron-yellow face, still and frozen with a scream of death, pleading with his huge wide-open mouth and bulging eyes. He hoped for help from the bird that flew above, from a friend, from an enemy, from the ants crawling on the ground. He was half asleep, half in a dream, and for the first time thought about how a person's life can be so fragile, so necessary, that so many people, maybe the vast majority, are able to degrade themselves so much and not give up. Is human life worth this much humiliation? Must life be lived at any cost? The diseases, illnesses, oppressions, tyrannies, hunger, poverty, these things haven't been able to break the vital strength of the human species; even after the cruelty, humiliation, damage, and carnage, human beings live on. What was this amazing strength, this endless resilience, to endure the most miserable conditions of cruelty in order to live, and for what? Kel Hamza, stumbling in the village in front of the horse with fear cutting through his entire body, stopped now and then and looked at him, as if he was begging like a dog, in such a way that the human heart can't endure. He struggled a lot with himself to kill him, and after all was done, thought that it was haram that the life of a person was taken like this from humanity. And when Ali Safa Bey saw him and Memed said, “Benim adım İnce Memed, beni bilebildin mi Ağa?” Ali Safa's face stiffened and his eyes grew big and opened and closed in fear, and in a moment, in the blink of an eye, his eyes were fully fixed on the barrel of the gun with an unbelievable look of pleading. In that momentary appeal, here was perhaps the worst kind of descent, the lowest that the species can fall. Was a life worth this much humiliation? Is life this much more valuable than anything else? 2
