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영어

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is an intricately designed literary puzzle featuring the elderly memoirist Iris Chase Griffen, who is a master storyteller and illusionist. This novel pays attention to the oppression of women in a patriarchal system and women’s cultural blindness. The most important event in her memoir is the suicide of her sister, Laura, who represents the victim of the violence of self-identity. In this paper, my aim is to examine how the violence of self-identity causes the other’s death, as well as why the acceptance of hospitality is necessary to focus on the concept of hospitality within Levinas and Derrida. To clarify, the other is an object that we should give unconditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality signifies hospitality receiving the other, without controlling him/her in the institution. However, the other could appear simultaneously as a good neighbor and enemy, since this hospitality does not contain any constraints. Referring to the Levinasian concept of this, it is the state of aporia. Nevertheless, hospitality is not a matter of choice, but a prerequisite for the human condition that one must face. Therefore, what Atwood emphasized is that only stopping violence of selfidentity along with accepting the other leads to the ultimate truth and salvation.