이창래의 『항복자』에 나타난 생존의 의미

Abstract

Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered (2010) is about three people’s wartime survival and their struggle with the traumatic memory of the war. June Han, a child refuge, Hector Brennan, an American soldier, and Sylvie Tanner, a missionary aid worker come together in an orphanage named “New Hope” in Yongin in South Korea right after the Korean War. The three become closely bound to each other as Hector and Sylvie become secret lovers and June also develops an obsession with Sylvie. The omniscient third-person narration reveals that each one struggles with the guilt after witnessing the brutal death of their loved ones and others in the war. The account of the three characters’ past trauma, desire for connection, and surrendering to the demand for joining in the process of repentance can be read as Lee’s suggestion of re-thinking the meaning of survival after traumatic experience of war. The moral dilemma in survivor guilt is the recognition that the survivors have failed in terms of human solidarity by not joining with the victims in their worst moment. The survival in this work is a process of restoring the sense and capacity of connecting with others through the recognition that self-loathing or self-debasement in guilt is a destructive mechanism for one’s self and the others close to them. The three characters’ desire for connection in their relationship in the orphanage offers hope for a new life out of their self-hatred for having survived. However, their relationship ends in Sylvie and other innocent people’s death in fire in the orphanage, and June and Hector repeat their solitary struggle from the guilt of becoming the cause for Sylvie’s sacrifice. They see it as a confirmation of their destiny: they are the cause for the sacrifices of the ones they love or care. Lee presents the meeting after decades between June and Hector as an important moment for building the empathic human dyad, which both June and Hector could not afford in their self-imposed exile after the traumatic experience. Hector surrenders to June’s demand to be a company for her search for their missing son, Nicholas, and to become her care-taker in her dying moment. With this experience, Hector becomes the sole survivor, who takes the responsibility of remembering what happened to Sylvie, June, and Nicholas. The journey is a way of June’s confessing her guilt for her little brother, Nicholas, and Sylvie as they are overlapped in June’s dying delirium. Hector’s sympathetic engagement with June’s account of her past can be understood as a process of transference and counter-transference, which Christopher Bollas observes as an emotionally laden scene of address, rerouting the unconscious and its overwhelmingness and enacting the capacity for transformation. Lee shows that forming a community of forgiveness through the inter-subjective connection between those who share the memory of loss can be a way for survival.