초록 열기/닫기 버튼
All through his career as a writer, John Barth has tried to find the key to reviving the exhausted voice of artists, lamenting the current situation of novelists who merely mimic others’ voices without their own creativity. Barth seeks to present unfixed realities encompassed by layers over layers in The Sot-Weed Factor, and goes back to the origin of a “story” and demystifies classic myths in Chimera. This study discusses this incessant effort of Barth’s, focusing on the way he employs a shape-shifting motif in these two novels. Barth disposes elaborately woven plots and verbose or exaggerated styles on the shape-shifting motif in The Sot-Weed Factor. In Chimera, Barth projects a contemporary writer’s block into everyone’s dilemma faced in the process of pursuing heroic achievements. He tries to take Polyeidus, the plotter and shape-shifter, who lingers in a closed circle, to a wide open space. What these shape-shifters intend to offer us is the awareness that there is no ultimate truth or center and that a thin line between reality and fiction is vague and blurred. It does not follow that we are forced to cave in to negativism in the absence of absolute value. It rather means that we can pursue solidarity of a community as well as individuals if we seek to find meaning in relative values or multiple realities in this ever-changing society.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera, shape-shifting, transformation, metamorphosis, Proteus, multiple realities,Bellerophoniad
