KJCKorea
Journal Central

Lee Seung-woo’s <Auto Bicycle> and <Black Tree> are the novels about dementia, with ‘guilty conscience’ appearing as the main motifs. This study is a discussion on the process how the narrative identity of dementia patients is formed, focusing on the relation of the meaning of ‘dementia’ and the ‘guilty conscience’, a key theme in Lee’s literature. Both works have in common that son is the narrator and their dementia󰠏stricken mother is the subject of the narrative. According to Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of identity, both of them show the mother’s narrative identity, while the former mainly shows ‘selfhood’, and the latter ‘identity’. In <Auto Bicycle>, dementia is understood as a device that may not operate a ‘recognition mechanism’, and therefore a device that can be freed from the distress of ‘guilty conscience’. In this regard, <Auto Bicycle> is a narration that shows the process of overcoming the guilty conscience of the dementia󰠏stricken mother, that is, a story about her narrative identity. And in the process, the promise that the son has ‘abandoned’ herself, which the mother has consistently insisted, eventually comes true, so the mother’s ‘selfhood’ plays an important role in the work. <Black Tree> shows the narration that the dementia󰠏stricken mother completes her narrative identity by facing the true nature of the guilt she has covered up. It was carried out by the narrator, her son, who understood her mother’s concealed guilt. In the mother’s narrative identity, the ‘steadfastness’ of her character that has so far been ‘sustained’ is maintained, so the novel can be interpreted as a work in which ‘identity’ plays an important role.

dementia, guilty conscience, narrative identity, selfhood, identity, Ricoeur