학병의 사명과 ‘위안부’의 운명-김성종의 「여명의 눈동자」(1975~1981)를 중심으로

Abstract

This article analyzes Kim Sung-jon’s novel “The Eyes of Dawn” to examine how student soldiers and ‘comfort women’, who were forcibly mobilized in the imperial war, are given different historical and social positions through the post-liberation and the Korean War. At the end of the Japanese colonial period, student soldiers and ‘comfort women’ have a sense of solidarity as colonial peoples despite the asymmetric power relationship of ‘comfort women’ in the wartime violence organization called wianso (慰安所, brothels). However, the solidarity formed as a counterpoint to the empire had no choice but to change according to the dynamics of ‘imperial-colonial’. In the post-liberation period, student soldiers advance as the subject of the historical ‘mission’ of nationbuilding, but ‘comfort women’ are again subordinated to the woman’s ‘fate’. At this time, the novel’s strategy to start a new era with a new generation reorganizes the structure of the confrontation between left and right wings during the post-liberation into ‘student soldiers vs. student soldier’. Through this, colonialism that has been passed down from those from the Japanese military is eliminated. These narratives show that ‘comfort women’, who were removed from the solidarity of the colonial people, were excluded from the present history by becoming a symbol of the past. In addition, it shows a mechanism by which the Allied/Korean military ‘comfort women’ that continued to exist on the Korean Peninsula were concealed. This article reveals that ‘comfort women’ were omitted from the representation of young people at the end of the Japanese colonial period represented by ‘student soldier’. Furthermore, it critically examines the paradoxical mechanism of ‘politics of memory’ in which by becoming a ‘symbol’ of history, one is excluded from history.