1910년대 모험서사의 번역과 일인칭 서술자의 탄생

Abstract

The narrator and point of view do not simply work to show how a novel is described. They convey the author’s attitude and view of the world. Furthermore, they are the methods to understand the social and aesthetic formats of literature. In order to understand the essence and history of Korean literature, therefore, it must be an essential task to review the first-person narrator(s) that emerged after the modern era. Especially, since the change of person (subject) in Korean language alters the forms of following verbs including their final endings and pre-final endings, the emergence of a new ‘first person’ narrator in Korean novels is closely related to the establishment of a new novel style that features the changes of final endings. Until recently, many researchers have discussed the emergence of first-person narrators and established the concept ‘the unity of spoken and written languages’, focusing on the Confessional novel of intellectuals, which began to appear in the late 1910s. In this process, however, the traces of the first-person narrator, which have been consistently translated since the beginning of the modern era, and the first-person novels that began to emerge in the 1910s were rarely discussed. The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, translated in 1913, and the Sinsoseol Hyeong Weol, written in 1915, demonstrate the interesting process of the birth of first-person narrators in modern Korean literary history. The two novels are new types of first-person narrative novels that use different styles of the unity of spoken and written language. Through these novels, the existence of “I(나)” as a narrator could finally appear in modern Korean novels. The most prominent feature of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen and Hyeong Weol is that the two novels use colloquial styles that appeared in Sinsoseol, such as ‘-오/소’, ‘-ㅂ디다’, ‘-리다’, and ‘-구려’, as their narrative styles. This feature deviates from the general history of Korean literature which delineates the development of narrator as the rise of obscure narrator whose identity is not easily identified through his or her narrative. Thus, by analyzing the two novels, one can discover the new possibilities of early modern Korean literary history in which various stylistic experiments were freely made.