나쓰메 소세키의 ‘탐정’인식‒소설 작품과 강연을 중심으로‒

Abstract

A job may function as a mirror reflecting the time period. The jobs appearing repetitively in works by Soseki closely connects not only to the values of the author alone but also to those of people who lived in the same time period. This focus has been brought up since Soseki frequently mentions the unusual job detective in both lectures and novel works. To begin with, detectives portrayed in his novels play a role of a job, while representing emptiness itself without any name or humans assigned to its existence. Furthermore, since it is portrayed inhumanly, it is considered as completely extinguished by the author as an alienated being from the real world. In the lecture ‘The Philosophical Basis of Literature’, he highlights that having detective as a job means the absence of qualification as a human being. He considers the attitudes of the detectives of destroying other ideologies besides truth as a morbid phenomenon. In addition, Soseki views detectives and the police from the same perspective. The police was his target of criticisms along with detectives, since they monitored and interfered in the daily lives of subjects of domination as they played a role for a dominator during the time period. Eventually, the existence of the police existed as a background in Soseki’s perception on detectives, and for being closely related to the system of the modern nation, served as the basis of criticism target.