김은국의 『순교자』와 안정효의 『하얀전쟁』에 나타난 문화의 충돌과 치유

Abstract

As the two most influential contemporary wars in Korean history, the Korean War and the Vietnam War not only caused heavy results in the participating nations but also revealed the dramatic conflicts of different religions and cultures in the violent confrontation. Among many English-written narratives related with these two wars, Richard Kim's The Martyred and Junghyo Ahn's White Badge are the most well-known and popular novels for Korean readers, which respectively delineate the Korean War and the Vietnam War with the emphasis of tragical and heuristic aspects of ideological warfares. In general, the war fiction contains two contrasting aspects of the artistic and the moral features. While Richard Kim's novel mainly focuses on the total realities of the war by encouraging the objective and existential viewpoints, Junghyo Ahn's novel faithfully follows the moralistically scathing satire on the war maintaining the constant strong stance of antiwar spirit. However, both novels have a lot in common in that the protagonist's consciousness has dramatically changed into the humane or the susceptible by valuing life and peace above all violent causes after their bitter experiences of the war. The contrastive conclusion between the minister Shin's heroic apotheosis and the private first class Byun's suicidal bathos only confirms how important the community listeners' careful acceptance of the war victims' post-traumatic stress disorder is in healing the deep pain. Only when community's sharings occur like the Greco-Roman tragic narratives' condolence rituals for the war victims, the violence and conflict caused by the confrontations of different religions and cultures can be healed as the wholesome community level, not as the individuals' struggles.