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Scientific Imagination and Human Exploration in SF Narratives :Focusing on Kim Cho-yeop’s “Why Do Pilgrims Never Return?”

  • The Journal of General Education
  • 2024, (28), pp.115~140
  • DOI : 10.24173/jge.2024.07.28.4
  • Publisher : Da Vinci Mirae Institute of General Education
  • Research Area : Social Science > Education > Field of Education > General Education
  • Received : June 20, 2024
  • Accepted : July 17, 2024
  • Published : July 31, 2024

Oh, Eun Yeop 1

1명지대학교 방목기초교육대학

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Based on Kim Cho-yeop‘s “Why Do Pilgrims Never Return?”, this study focuses on the author's ideal utopia and the aspects of human exploration by analyzing the narrative structure and spatial characteristics. The future world of “Why Do Pilgrims Never Return” have had a system of human embryonic procedures and bio hacking, causing the social inequality and hatred, delicately shown that the emotional lives of the weak (non-reformed) of the ‘new human race’. This novel is composed in an epistolary narrative by Daisy, where various internal stories are reconstructed and act as elements of novum that stimulates SF imagination, solving the chain of questions generated in the novel. The unexpected novelty that the stories reveal creates an unfamiliar space of imagination for Sophie (or the reader), the recipient of the letter, while also allowing her to enhance her thinking and sensitivity toward things that have not yet been realized. The fantastic stories used in the main narrative explain in detail the narratives of each ‘new human race (post human)’. If the Abstract 140 교양학연구 28집development of science and technology has removed the uniqueness and autonomy of individuals and forced an alienating perspective that views humans as physical objects, the stories that unfold during the pilgrimage process encounter this by focusing on and immersing individuals in their inner stories, by creating generosity and inclusiveness is recovering its gaze. This narrative device divides the narrative space of the work into multiple layers. The pilgrims are moving characters who traverse the boundary between inside and outside, forming a track of meaningful events. They get the opportunity to leave the village and decide their lives by their own will, and gradually have identities of change and growth. The emotion is the source of poetic justice that have us discover individual human existence, measure its inner depth, and empathize with pain and joy. Border space Itasa enables a complex perspective which lets us to realize facts that could not be accurately perceived elsewhere. Humans reflect on the past and imagine the future again and they can change independently. If you are a human being who lives for self-actualized happiness with your own true feelings, you can live as an ethical subsistence who finds value even in an irrational and absurd life. In a true sense, happy humans are able to open up the possibility to sympathize with others and ponder the meaning of life more deeply through sadness and pain.

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