최인호의 「타인의 방」에 나오는 아파트

Abstract

This paper attempts to understand the socio-cultural context of the apartment in Choi In-ho's “Stranger’s Room” and, based on this, to examine the author's intentions and themes of the work. Existing studies on “Stranger’s Room” have generally regarded the apartment as a typical form of residence in modern cities and an expression of modernity. However, the social situation in 1971 when the work was published was quite different from today. The apartment was a new and unfamiliar form of housing, with a prevalence rate of less than 1%, and the spatial structure and functions of apartments were also distinctly different from today's apartments. First of all, this paper examined what kind of apartment is the apartment in the work. This paper compared the apartments in the work with Citizen Apartment, Common peple’s Apartment, and Mansion Apartment by referring to data on architectural and residential history, and as a result, it was confirmed that the apartment in the work was Mansion Apartment. Mansion apartment was the finest apartment of the time, which was greatly differentiated in quality from existing apartments in terms of space size and facilities. Therefore, it is presumed that the writer who used the mansion apartment as the subject had a different intention to write than to draw the average daily life of urban people. Since “Stranger’s Room” was a work that the Choi In-ho changed his mind while trying to complete “The Uncivilized”, it is necessary to pay attention to the commonalities between the two works. The two works are commonly linked to the real estate craze of 1970, and it is assumed that the author's handling of mansion apartment has a certain relationship with the rapid spread of materialism in the early 1970s. In the works, apartment is signified as objects of desire. This seems to be the result of reflecting the socio-cultural context of the mansion apartment, which was strongly desired by the public at the time, in the work. The apartment scenes depicted in the works seem to depict ordinary apartment life by today's standards, but at the time, they were objects of envy and jealousy that strongly stimulated the public's desire to own an apartment. Meanwhile, the main character is a person who wants to confirm his existence by claiming exclusive ownership of the object he desires, that is, the apartment and his wife. The status as the owner he claimed could be established when the relationship between the subject and the object was understood as the relationship between the owner and the slave. Therefore, the moment he realized his wife's trick, his status as the owner was bound to be threatened rapidly. The ending of the fiction, in which the main character is transformed into an object due to a rebellion of objects, is interpreted as the crack in exclusive ownership he claimed eventually leading to the collapse of existence. In addition, when referring to the ending of “The Uncivilized”, the ending of “Stranger’s Room” can be read as criticism and warning of compromise with reality. Therefore, “The Stranger's Room” can be seen as a work criticizing the excessive material desires prevalent in the early 1970s by showing a person who believed that his desires could be achieved through what he owned falling from the status of the owner to the status of the object.