『북간도』에 나타난 형식과 역사의 변증법

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the characteristics of the narrative structure of the novel North Kando (北間島) and investigate the thematic effects and author’s consciousness. The main storylines of North Kando (北間島) are those of the two generations of the Lee family, the father Lee Changyun and his son Lee Jeongsu, to which the other characters’ storylines are connected. Though this novel covers four generations, all of the generations of the three major families do not act significantly. So it can not be said that North Kando (北間島) is a family-history novel. The five characters of the Lee family are the representatives of the nationalist independence movement. As for Jang family, the first generation’s Jang Chideok acts like Lee Hanbok but the third generation’s Jang Hyeondo becomes a representative of the routine life. As for the Choi family, each generation acts so differently that we can not determine the family identity. In addition, considering that there are negative groups of Chinese power, the colonialist Japanese power and those who go with the current of that time, the oppositional structure of North Kando (北間島) becomes clear. This novel has a binary structure of the nationalists for independence movement and their opposites. The binary structure intensifies the theme-effects, in combination with the specific narrative strategy of this novel. North Kando (北間島) freely uses the narrative pattern of ‘showing an episode and then telling its socio-historical circumstances as a background’. This pattern is widely used between sub-chapters, paragraphs or passages and sometimes it engenders some variations. The effects of the narrative strategy using those patterns widely are as follows. First, the strategy makes it possible to include in one novel the entire span from the pre-modern times of the late 18th century to the end of the colonial period. Second, the strategy engenders some aesthetical effects. ⅰ) The narrative strategy makes it possible to set the long span and the broad space of North Kando into one novel without the composition of the one major long and wide storyline. ⅱ) It obtains the dramatical effects of showing form. ⅲ) It makes the semantic tension between the showing and telling parts. The third effect of the strategy is a aesthetical defect. It makes some gap between the story instance and the narrator-author’s discourse instance, which results in the lack of the description of the characters’ psychology and the inner relation of characters. North Kando (北間島) figures the history of the nationalist independence movement. The scale of the history above mentioned is so large that narrating that history asks for a river novel but North Kando (北間島) is simply a novel. From this gap between the novel’s form and its overweight contents come the peculiar narrative strategy and its aesthetical effects. In this sense, it can be said that North Kando (北間島) is one significant example of the dialectics of form and history.