원문정보
초록
영어
Park Bum-shin’s Salt delineates a father who has lost his place in a capitalist society and a family collapsed by consumptive desire. Capitalism commodifies everything including human beings and polarizes the society on the basis of the possession of capital. It generates discursive alterations in culture and lifestyle, and the father’s place and roles too are influenced by it. Especially in Korea, capitalism collapses the tradition of patriarchy and drives the unproductive father out of his place as head of household. The feeble productivity of the father who fails to be interpolated into the middle class continues to be manipulated by the capitalist. Nevertheless the paternal responsibility that Korean culture imposes upon the father is still valid and incessantly oppresses him. While the family addicted to conspicuous consumption spend like maniacs, the father’s labor is always insufficient to gratify the family’s desire. In such circumstances, Sun Myung-woo whose family has become like his pancreatic cancer finds no way to survive in the reality. He has to leave, dreaming of being free from capitalist ideology. He proclaims disconnection from “productivity” that he has been subject to in his whole life. Through his devotion to paralyzed Kim Seung-min and his dysfunctional family, he attempts to begin a new life that can hopefully exist outside the periphery of capitalism. However ironically, he seems to be fettered again to the new family and to the goal of “the best salt.” In this context, this paper construes the novel within Marxist criticism and discusses the issue of identity of the Korean father, the connotation of Myung-woo’s new family, and the author’s advice.
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Works Cited
Abstract