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영어

Toni Morrison's A Mercy is an attempt to reconfigure the prenational time of American history and to restore the interracial, interethnic, and intercultural context before its accommodation in the dominant discourses of national history. Morrison provides her vision of a communal relationship by presenting the main character's act of writing as the interlocutory scene in which she gives a narrative account of her life to the other. The main character, Florens's first-person narration can be understood as the dyadic scene of self and other as it is motivated by the desire to recognize and to be recognized by the free blacksmith, the one she is in love with. However, she is telling her story to her now estranged lover, by scratching it onto the walls of her master, Jacob Vaark's mansion. It is very unlikely for the blacksmith to visit the mansion again, and besides, he cannot read. This motif of failed address also offers an explanation of Florens's relationship with her mother, who, as a slave, chose to send Florens away not to make her a victim of the sexual abuse by her master, D'Ortega. However, Florens, at the age of eight, could not fathom her mother's intention, and remembers the separation as her mother's abandonment. The motif of failed address becomes the condition of subjecthood and relation as the wrong or incomplete message from the mother becomes a driving force for Florens's effort to interpret her experience and her search for selfhood against the social force of racism. Florens also builds the sense of self in the process of telling her life story to the blacksmith. Florens's narrative shows that the self is not fully bounded to or separate from the other, but in its vulnerability and singularity depends on the other. This point can be related to Adriana Cavarero's concept of “the narrating self.” Cavarero argues that the subject is not a solipsistic or independent entity closed upon itself but emerges in relation to the other in the conditions of address. In her view, we are beings exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity, and if “I” do not have “you” to address, my story becomes impossible as my singularity or uniqueness can be recognized in the interlocutory situation or in the encounter with the other, who is also unique. Morrison shows that our vulnerability as subject becomes the condition for our responsibility for each other and that the reciprocity can be a relational mode of the communities formed counter to the dominant discourses of national history.