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영어

Building upon his previous two novels (namely, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life), which probed the problematic identity of ethnic minority and the exclusionary logic buttressing it, Chang-rae Lee’s latest work titled Aloft shifts its narrative focus onto a story of a white man’s middle class family thereby bringing to bear its thematic scope on the universal problem of human isolation. As the result, Aloft creates the impression of turning away from the restrictive theme of racial politics and its oppressive measures. This view, however, is a misleading one in so far as it presupposes the naturalized image of ‘family.’ In contrast to the conventional image of family qua minimal organic unit of community, a series of incessant conflicts and power struggle underlie the apparent simplicity of this “family story.” And it is against that conceptual backdrop of conflict-driven communality, the text attempts a more sophisticated problematization of such (post)colonial issues as Orientalism, racism, and gender oppression, wherein Jerry, the protagonist and pater familias, metonymically functions as a stereotypical white colonialist. He intentionally distorts the images of ethnic and gender minorities including his own family members, thereby silencing the voices of alterity from the text, which dramatizes “the battle field” between the oppressive rule of sovereignty and the resistance to it. This study argues that Aloft depicts family as a mirror and microcosm of the social as such, where every subject is, without exception, forced to engage in hegemonic power struggle not only for recognition but for survival.