「동동」화자의 심리

Abstract

In this article, it will be attempted to understand and comprehend the psychological state of the “DongDong”’s narrator, by applying the concept of ‘Defense mechanism’ to the task of analyzing the situation involving the narrator. The so-called ‘Defense mechanism’ refers to a device, which would protect and shield the narrator’s ‘self’ from all the incoming(intruding) variables, as the narrator itself would be, usually, hardly in a position to adequately respond to such disruptive contacts. Such defensive devices can be found inside the February, March, May, July, November and December sections. Especially the odd behaviour displayed by the narrator in the May section almost implies the attitude of ‘denial’: the narrator’s refusal to admit the absence of ‘Nim(the lover)’. In that regard, the ‘Nim(lover)’ described in the February and March sections should not be read as a figure positioned in a ritual context, but instead read as a display of a revised memory owned by the narrator. In the meantime, in the July section seems there seems to be a relationship of ‘substitution’ between a ‘table’(with things placed upon it on the day of ‘departed soul’), and the ‘hope for reunion’. This is because such ‘table’ arranged on the ‘departed soul’ day, with all the Baekjong(百種) placed(排) upon it, indeed show a look distinctively similar to that of the table which symbolized the narrator’s very own hope, and also because it actually quite much resembled the table where the narrator had earlier sat with a ‘Noksa(錄事)’ figure in the past. This table figure is closely related to another plate(table) / 盤(床) which was put in front of the ‘Nim(lover)’, as described in the December section. The narrator lying under its own underwear inside the Bongdang chamber can be considered as conducting a form of ‘sleeping ritual’, which falls into the category of ‘ritualization’. Such sleeping ritual is believed to have been held with sexual expectations in mind, and we can see such hope was eventually turned down in the December section. From that section, we can presume that it was not ‘Nim’ but the ‘guest’ who grabbed the aroma(‘芳香’) chopstick, which had previously been placed upon the plate(table), but actually the ‘plate(table)’ and the ‘chopstick’ seem to be substitutions for the bed and the narrator. This must have been the ‘unforgettable experience’ that forced the narrator to rely upon ‘defensive mechanisms’.