earticle

영어

In Kim Saryang’s early works, many of the protagonists remind us of the author himself, but most of these protagonists/narrators take the attitude of onlookers, maintaining a distance from the developments of the plot. However, in Kyoshu [Homesickness], the representative work of Kokyo [Home], the second collection of his works, this structure is shaken. Kyoushu is a distinctive work because of the way in which even though its narration is from a third person perspective the distance between protagonist and narrator suddenly narrows and then just as suddenly expands again. In all these sections, Kim Saryang’s national emotion is expressed. In particular the sudden separation of narrator and protagonist in the section in Hokkai Park. expresses the anxiety with regard to Japanese of a writer from a colony. Broadly speaking, there are three parts of the book where this mix-up in the narration occurs: his recollections in the train on the way to Manchuria of the great power that Korea held in her past; in the section where the protagonist screams as he disguises the voice of the pottery, “I” and the hero become one and the same but at the same time, in the episode in the park the protagonist and the narrator do not share the same information. The fact of the story’s narrator placing distance between himself and the psychological state of the protagonist and then closing that distance is not in itself that special, but there are parts of Kyoshu where this distance between the narrator and the hero change abruptly. In particular, this is a feature of the sections where the writer’s “national emotion” is expressed. Through Korean culture as represented by Kokuryo, by the use of the instinctively defined elements of history, culture and language that that make a race Kokyo and Kyoshu expand to become something ethnic. The fact that Kim Saryang’s concept of “home” is connected to the nation.