극기에의 실패: 김승옥 초기 소설 연구

Abstract

This study explored the concepts of own-world and self-mastery in Kim Seong-Ok’s early novels. The world perceived by the characters in Kim Seong-Ok’s early novels is separated with dichotomous structures, such as in/out, night/morning, chaos/cosmos, which is revealed and mediated by the notion of own-world. The noticeable point in this notion is associated with the boundary represented as a shell or rampart. The characters in Kim Seong-Ok’s novels experience severe threat of existence due to the artificial boundaries that they set on their own. To overcome the gap between the separated selves is descried as the duty transcendentally given to the characters in Kim Seong-Ok’s novels. The struggles of each character are named as “self-mastery”, a self-deceptive term. The success or failure in the attempts to overcome is a crucial issue to determine their fates. The characters who completely fail in self-mastery face tragic endings in the novels. Meanwhile, the Kim Seong-Ok’s novels also significantly describe the characters who struggle not to fail in self-mastery including “I’, the-first-person narrator frequently appeared in his novels. The inner self of “I” is intentionally closed. It is indirectly disclosed by the mentions and behaviors of the characters which can be identified with “I”. In the other worlds, the circumstances of Kim Seong-Ok’s novels can be regarded as the way of delivering narratives of a man who already establishes the rampant of own-world . Their solid own-world , however, are cracked by the sense of guilty derived from death of others. The cracks become the evidences to demonstrate the impossibility of the frame of own-world created by ultimately artificial and self-deceptive self-consciousness.