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영어

This study aims to portray the racial reality of American society and the critical dispute over “white mythology” through Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Roth creates Coleman Silk who was unexpectedly born with white skin from black ancestry to effectively develop subtle problems related to race. He unintentionally comes to assume the life of a white person because others always perceive him as a white man. The reason why he chose a white man’s life was simply to avoid the difficult lives of black people in American society. But the advantages of white skin which originally brought him luck change into unfortunate circumstances. Namely, this indicates that there was already betrayal in the whiteness Black preferred, as a result of the destiny of Peripeteia between luck and tragedy. Main character’s tragedy is based on the “white mythology” of defining nonwhite as ‘the Other’. In this novel Roth emphasizes that the more society underlines purity or whiteness monolithically, the stronger a “purity ideology” is imprinted. The theme conveyed in The Human Stain through the account of Silk’s humiliation is that it is a society’s ideology and prejudices which gave nonwhite a “human stain”. This study, therefore, intends to demonstrate that The Human Stain shows the problems of prejudice and violence.