「 타인의 방 」 에 나타난 사물화의 양가성 연구 - 「 변신 」 , 『구토』 와의 비교를 중심으로 -

Abstract

Choi Inho’s short story A Room of Strangers reminds the reader of Kafka’s Metamorphosis through the motif of metamorphosis and evokes Sartre’s Nausea through the motif of “resistance of things”. The purpose of this study is to show that Choi’s story is constructed through the combination of these two motifs from the classical works of modern literature, and to explain the meaning of this construction. To this end, we first analyze the meaning of the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s novella and that of the nausea caused by rebellious things in Sartre’s novel. Then A Room of Strangers is analyzed and interpreted from the viewpoint how Choi In-ho adopts the two motifs and integrates them into the plot of his own story about an alienated man. Beyond the superficial similarity of motifs these three works are connected to each other in a deeper sense. Central for the problematic of this paper is the consciousness of crisis that human existence and life has become meaningless and absurd in the 20th century. While the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis seems to believe in such a life and fail in his belief, the main concern in Sartre’s “Nausea” is to discover and affirm the meaninglessness of existence. For Antoine Roquentin, the main character of the novel, the insight that the existence of things is groundless makes him aware of his own groundlessness, and this perception eventually becomes a decisive turning point in his life. Confronted with the rebellion of things, the anonymous protagonist of A Room of Strangers first get terrified of that, but he can get out of his alienated life through these experiences and falls into the festive play of things. So this short story tells a similar development as that of Roquentin in a much more dramatical way. However, such a new awareness and process of liberation is clouded by a negative view on the protagonist’s metamorphosis into a dead and rigid thing. His reification is reminiscent of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, and makes the story into a tragedy of alienation. So it can be both a story of resurrection and that of death. This ambiguous conclusion comes from the writer’s desire of escaping from the dark reality through literary and artistic imagination, but with a full consciousness of the reality that makes his desire illusory.