인간실격(人間失格)』에 내재된 이항대립 연구

Abstract

The novel written by the writer with some feelings of making his testament ruminating on his tragic youth just before he committed suicide is a prominent work which gives feelings of hanging loose of a satire rather than the desperateness of the story. The novel is a rare work in that it leaves room for questions for a wide range of interpretations from the title to the content. A so-called three-dimensional interpretation is possible, which, I found, is usually originated from the structure of binary opposition. For that reason, I will focus on the work through the structure. Resultingly, I had results as the follows. Firstly, even if the ‘Human Disqualification’ represented in the title is what the main character Yojo said punishing himself, I realized that the hypocritical people, or the binary opposition, surrounding him rather were read as the human disqualification. Secondly, it was also possible to identify the people who Yojo referred to as ‘difficult’ as the perceptive subjects between the lines. The nature covered with a coat called a difficulty was insight, and it seemed that other people were fully ready to start a shower of complaints against Yojo’s difficulty on the contrary to the content of memoirs. I also noticed that this series of an irony could be read between the lines of the world of binary opposition, the structure of the novel. Yojo, thirdly, was doing an act of an assumed evil deviating from the old perception or a custom in his suffocating position surrounded by hypocrisy, which ironically was taking the role of catharsis for Yojo and the reader as well. Fourthly, Yojo said that a humor was a service for the last courtship for people. It was indeed in a way but it was more like a service for himself after all. It was because a humor was the flashy performance of a momentary role change in the contrasting structure between stillness and movement, entombment and incarnation, passiveness and initiative, adaptation and deviation, and object and subject, which provided relative interpretation between each other. The novel is a trace of a youth who lived the time honestly with his own uncompromising and indefatigable passion and every fiber of his body and is like a scream of Dajai in his youth as well. What gives more weight to the novel is a number of metaphoric interpretations between the lines. The writer crossed the borderline between a satire on society and self-contemplation flamboyantly through them. In this way, the tragic report of a failure was reborn as courteous literature with phrases of a humor and a wit instead of the heavy words of anger. It was possible because of the paradox of binary opposition.