聖人의 境地와 小說의 길

Abstract

A person who came to be able to completely throw off egocentrism is called a saint by us. The saint who reached this stage comes to have two virtues dubbed modesty and mercy at the best level. Among novels, there are some works of strongly revealing especially a desire of aiming to reach the stage of a saint in this way or a will to make exploration on such stage. These kinds of works are thought to have the highest value in the aspect of theme even out of numerous novels. Just for a reason of being a novel that contains such theme, of course, it isn't automatically secured the position of excellent work. In order for any novel to be recognized as a truly creditable work, there is a need of having artistic achievement, too, in addition to having high value in the thematic aspect. Searching for masterpieces of widely having the conditions as men- tioned just now among Korean novels, it will be able to be preferentially taken 「Deungshinbul(等身佛)」(Kim Dong-ri),『Come Low Unto Us』(Yi Cheong- jun),『Evergreen Pine Tree』(Kim Won-il),『Evening in the World』(Jeong Chan), 「If a Splash of Water Drops」(Kim Won-il). It is a well-known fact that many problems have been produced with being extremely strengthened human beings' egocentrism in modern times. Hence, a work of newly inspecting its significance with paying attention to the works, which were mentioned in the above, and the works, which basi- cally have the same character as it, can offer significant implication to per- forming a task as saying of needing to proceed with developing the desir- able history of man in the future with properly overcoming problems that were made by the modern era.