오에 겐자부로의『비둘기(鳩)』론- 소년 집단의 우의성을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper takes Kenzaburō Ōe’s early short story “Dove(HaTo)” as the object of consideration. Breaking free from the conventional interpretative framework of depicting the existentialist inner world of human beings, the paper analyzes the allegorical nature implied by the boy group focusing on the daily lives of the boys confined in a reformatory. The interior of the juvenile reformatory is structured in a constant rotation between inside and outside, which makes the boys the subject of their own observation rather than the object of surveillance and supervision. The boy group has no sense of guilt despite being classified as violent offenders. The boy group share their sins and form a tight solidarity to make their shared sins into material for pleasure. The sharing of sin is the forgetting of sin. The collectivist characteristics of the boys, who have a collective identity but no sense of guilt, overlap with postwar Japan, which has forgotten its war crimes. Another characteristic is that a hierarchical system has been established within the group, and boys naturally accept male homosexuality. The lack of sexual subjectivity of boys who do not refuse to become same-sex sexual objects means the lack of political subjectivity in postwar Japan. What is projected through the daily lives of the boys trapped in the wall is the national collective of Japan. The narrator, who becomes conscious of his own guilt in the ‘Dove Incident’, acts out of anger and despair toward the outside world, and his self-punishment is also a result of his anger and despair toward the outside world. What is conveyed through the boy gorup in “Dove(Hato)” is the negative aspects of Japan's period of rapid economic growth, the forgetting of guilt through shared guilt, and the lack of political subjectivity that has not overcome the emperor's fascism during the war. Rather than being a work that focuses on the existential awareness of the individual within a boy group confined by concrete walls, “Dove(Hato)” is a work that depicts the reality of Japanese society in the late 1950s.