초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Franklin Hata’s narrative in Chang-rae Lee’s 1999 novel, A Gesture Life, can be read as a process of finding the point of his guilt in his experience with Kkutaeh, who was brought as a sex slave into the Japanese military base in Burma where Hata had been posted as a medical assistant during the Pacific War. Hata’s failure to act on Kkutaeh’s appeal to kill her in mercy is a traumatic event in his life, and the memory provides a deeper understanding of his repeated failures in the relationship with Sunny, his adopted daughter, and his life-long desire for acceptance from his adopted nation and society. In the narrative tracing back his journey of establishing a new identity, Hata’s voice becomes more self-reflective about his anxiety about belonging, and even darker with the desire for self-annihilation. Hata’s narrative reveals that in his struggle for group acceptance, he has avoided facing the crucial point of his responsibility as he has assumed "the role of disinterested spectator" and did not act or make an ethical choice which can lead to the recognition of who he is. He realizes that Kkutaeh’s demand for his action or choice is in fact a call for his ethical response as a singular being. Kierkegaard sees that our sin comes to existence as we see ourselves as a free and singular subject, and that the sensitivity to the inner freedom engenders the sensitivity to sin. The realization is an event in which a subject discovers her or his irreplaceable singularity. In the singularity, one finds that there is no substitution for the choice or act but himself or herself. Therefore responsibility is inherent in guilt and in one’s recognition of himself or herself as a free and thinking subject. In this sense, Hata’s admission that he was in fact “a critical part of events” and that he and others were central in the larger processes of victimizing Kkutaeh is the moment he finds his singularity as a responsible subject.
