宋炳洙 전후소설 연구

Abstract

Song Byeongsu's early works expressed the horrors of war through painful lives of war orphans and prostitutes and discovered humanism from their cordial relations. The writer was interested in the society that war orphans form the foundation of criminal organizations. He expanded horrors of war into social issues by shedding lights on personal histories of individual characters in postwar Korean society. To prove that individuals cannot be excluded from history, he borrowed artistic images as well as he listed facts. The confused situation that people lost their ethnic and national identity and their pride leaded individuals to sink into the inner world. The trauma of war let people give priority to filling physical desire than platonic and ideal love. Women changed to become active sexual subjects only to survive, but consequently, it leaded them to find the true value of lives. It was social changes and pregnancy and childbirth due to indiscriminate sexual relations that made postwar women anguish for the existential meaning of human being and look themselves back. Radical Women pursued pleasure from sexual relations but also became self-aware through their body. Both men who treated women as objects of sexual amusement and women who thought of men as means of living opened their eyes to the love of living things. Chracters who faced with death realized human dignity and encountered existence. Young women had to take the responsibility of unwanted pregnancy and delivery but became self-aware while they overcame the corruption of the postwar society. Both intellectuals' anguish that they fought in the unjustifiable war and the physiology and the sexual desire of radical women became a part of which dominated the writer's works. In Korean postwar society, changes in the view of intellectuals seems to be influenced by foreign(Italian or French) existentialism or neorealism movies.