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영어

The notion of ‘death’ is one of the symbols that represents the image of ‘war’. This paper examines the reason for the characters in the poast-war novels who commit suicide even though they escape from the threat of genocide and mass violence during the war. Of the short, meium-length, and long novels in Moon-ye, Hyeondae-Moonhak, Jeonseon-Moonhak, Sasanggye, and Saebyeok around mid-1900, it was examined to draw the representation of ‘suicide’ through semiotic functional relation and categorized the types of suicide commitment into three depending on the status of the suicide: drawn by the author, commitment of suicide as a punishment by the third person’s push, and social threaten upon a person to commit suicide. The characters in the novels have brutal history caused by war such as murder, rape, loss of chastity, kangaroo court, betrayer and custody. Those traumatic memories become a guilt trip to lead a person into suicide. It seems like a character’s suicide which is caused by a guilt trip in a disastrous environment of Korean war would represents the symbol of the guilt trip. However, the guilt trip is merely the trigger X of the commitment of suicide, and the political, systemic, and conventional environment is the fundamental environmental condition X2 which represents an ideological suicide and a character’s status having no choice.Post-war literature showed the government’s control over an individual and reminding him obedience to the government by forcing the fallen morality in the chaotic social environment after war. It also showed that the society after Korean War was the transition period that the feudalistic norm and the virtue of modern-ages are mixed without clear division. This leads to the conclusion that a suicide is committed by threaten of societal system rather than ideological conflict.