ABSTRACT
Yılanların Öcü is a social realist novel that represents the village life with realistic details drawing attention to problems and conflicts experienced by people in Karataş – a small poor village with 80 houses. In this novel, landscape and natural world with plants and animals are indispensable for village life, especially for poor peasants whose economic income depends on farming. Events are initiated by corruption in the village which centers on Dark Bayram and his family who struggle hard to cope with unequal treatment of muhktar and other local people who have better economic status. Dark Bayram has a mother, a wife, and three children: no other relatives apart from an aunt is mentioned; he is poor and does not have any powerful and wealthy relatives; his poor and lower socioeconomic status makes him an easy target for this unequal treatment. While the family is dealing with this problem, snakes, which are already a part of the family’s oral history told by elders, begin to haunt their lives and imagination. This chapter focuses on snakes and their multilayered appearance in the novel as they not only come to the fore through myths and supernatural stories pervading the oral culture of the peasant community but also they seem to threaten and haunt the very social life with their sudden and frightening presences.
