KJCKorea
Journal Central

Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity is the identity of a human being aquired through the mediation of story function. In novels, the narrative identity is a key element in the understanding of the works. On which character does it focus? Lee Seung󰠏woo’s works on dementia motifs, <About the Solar Eclipse> and <Room>, are analyzed to focus on the story identity of the narrator who watches dementia patients. The ‘guilty conscience’ of the narrator ‘I’ in <About the Solar Eclipse> was that he felt a ‘killing desire’ for his insane father. And this sense of guilt changes through an incident in which he listened to an apology from an old man with dementia who mistook him for his son. In other words, he reconciled with his father who was taken place by the old man on the occasion of the temporary ‘time lockup device’, namely, ‘eclipse’ and ‘demantia’. And he establishes his own narrative identity, moving from the ambiguity as the ambivalence of the original guilty conscience of his father to the certainty accepting his father as a part of his life. The ‘guilty conscience’ of the narrator ‘I’ in <Room> is a sense of debt to his aunt who raised him as like her own son. His family broke up becaue of rhe problem bringing the aunt with dementia home. And ‘I’ formed his narrative identity that moves toward a new order through ‘writing novel’, the objective act of understanding oneself, and the act bringing ‘an homeless old man’ home, as a moral emotion, the empathy for others. Lee Seung󰠏woo’s <About the Solar Eclipse> and <Room> are distinguished from other dementia motif novels such as <Auto Bicycle>, <Black Tree> in the formers focus on the identity of the narrator watching dementia patients. While all of these works are based on ‘guilty conscience’, the central theme of Lee’s literature, they are classified into other types in terms of narrative identity, allowing Lee’s works to move forward into a system of integration and classification.

dementia, guilty conscience, narrative identity, narrator, ambivalence, moral emotion