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영어

Chang-rae Lee's latest novel On Such a Full Sea departs from his previous four novels of diaspora and describes a dystopian future America with its rigid social and economic stratification represented by three mutually-exclusive districts of ‘Charter,’ ‘B-Mor,’ and ‘counties.’ This study aims to probe the characterization of the heroine Fan and the function of the plural first-person narrator ‘we’, and thereby reveal the theme of diasporic imagination which has been Lee’s persistent concern throughout his literary career. The central consciousness of the novel is the collective narrator ‘we’, who follows, records, interprets, and evaluates the adventures, across the border of those closed societies, of the atypical hero Fan whose consciousness and emotions remain unrevealed. It is the collective narrator ‘we’ who matures from a cynical and prejudiced mass to an actively engaging community with diasporic imagination which liberates them from the limitation of closed societies through the process of hybridization.