earticle

영어

Chang-rae Lee’s most recent novel is not a SF fiction à la Le Guin, but certainly speculative and set in the dystopian future America. For all the dystopian features of the novel, it is based upon the author’s solid reading of present-day American and global socio-political-economic situation. This essay aims to analyze the socio-political aspects of the world constructed in On Such a Full Sea, drawing on the Foucaudian concept of bio/necropolitics, and the concept of “expulsions” from Saskia Sassen’s sociological study of transnational global economy. These concepts help to understand how the novel’s future world got to be there. This essay ultimately argues that Chang-rae Lee presents the three different classes in the novel as all trapped in a highly stratified society, and analyzes how he portrays the spiritual and psychological consequences of living in such a world. It is Fan’s risk-taking departure from the cloistered production facility, called B-Mor, that spurred the B-Morians to call into question where they are. The narrator “we,” in the first person plural form, finds the possibility of change in the freedom of soul that Fan witnesses in a few people she encounters in her journey. Through their communal art work of legend-making about Fan, the B-Morians start to make sense of themselves, and begin to change their understanding of the world.