4·19와 쓰기의 존재론 - 1960년대 최인훈·이청준 장편소설의 ‘서술 시점’을 중심으로

Abstract

The April 19 revolution featured writers and characters who exploring and writing who they were with a sensitive sense of self-consciousness. However, having a reflective self-consciousness that explores who one is is painful, because it means facing the truth that one is neither unique nor free. In particular, the longing for self-consciousness and freedom that was fostered by the April 19 revolution, only to be thwarted by the May 16 military coup, caused existential pain for Korean writers. Choi In-hoon's The GreyMan and Lee Cheong-joon's Unwritten Autobiography center on a writerly figure who tries to talk about himself, revealing the narrative of an era when self-statement is impossible. This article analyzes the aspects of the first-person narrative point of view, focusing on the writer's character ‘I' in 1960s novels, Choi In-hoon's The GreyMan and Lee Cheongjun's Unwritten Autobiography. The GreyMan is composed of a dominant third-person narrative point of view, with the first-person narrative monologue of the author's character, Dokgo Joon, interjected between the third-person narrative. Unwritten Autobiography takes a first-person narrative perspective throughout and is organized in a way that reveals the gap between the past ‘I' who makes a self-declaration and the present ‘I' who recalls the past. In The GreyMan, the ‘I' wants to fulfill his self as an individual who is not bound by any relationship, but is constantly conscious that the language he uses, his perception and perspective of the world, and his experiences are all translations from Western language and ideas. If the first-person narrative, which is unmediated at the time of the third-person narrative, is a direct presentation of the inner life of ‘I', then the self-statement of Dokgo Joon is revealed in the sentences of the monologue in which ‘I' is presented as the subject. His self-statement contains the content of self-denial through the predicate of ‘not', and the only truth about his own existence that he could state was to confess that he was not anything, the impossibility of self-statement itself. In Unwritten Autobiography, the ‘I' is a writer recalling his past, and it consists of narrating what happened to him in a specific period of his past. The ‘I' of the past is driven into a fantasy of self-interrogation by the dual inner consciousness of censorship and desire for self-statement. In the fantasy, the ‘I’ hesitates and delays self-statements about the ‘I’. The present ‘I' recalls the illusions and situations it has experienced in the past and narrating the impossibility of self-statement as a definite truth that can be told about his existence.