한국전쟁 포로와 전체성의 폭력: 폴 윤의 『스노우 헌터스』와 하 진의 『전쟁 쓰레기』를 중심으로

Abstract

This study analyzes the meaning of totality of war and violence in Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters and Ha Jin’s War Trash, which are narratives about prisoners of the Korean War. According to Emmanuel Levinas, The true violence of war comes not from killing or being killed, but from the totality that does not show the Other as the Other. Yohan and Yu Yuan in both novels were forced into battle field against their will, became ‘tools of the state’, and then became prisoners of war. The two men were either completely uninterested in ideology or criticized ideology itself. In other words, the two men were ‘communist prisoners of war, not being communists.’ During the Korean War, the POW camps were in a state of exception where international law did not apply, and the pro-communist and anti-communist camps fought an another war to attract more prisoners to their camps. In the state of exception called the POW camps, survival itself became a task that each individual POW had to accomplish. In order to survive, like Yu Yuan, one had to change one’s words and actions according to the situation, and like Yohan, one had to forget the flow of time and space by sewing all day long. It is most important for ‘the same’ to maintain life and preserve identities. Preserving one’s identities becomes an essential foundation for the same to move toward a situation where the totality is broken. The same, by not returning to the self, becomes the starting point of a movement that will ultimately meet the metaphysics, the Other.