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The Study on the Melancholy and Allegory in Kim Yu-Jung's Self-Narrative -focus on the「Toad」 and 「Life Companion」

Yeonhee Jeong 1

1대진대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine the emotions of melancholy and allegories in Kim Yu-jung's self narrative. Kim Yu-jung thought of himself as a depressed person and seemed to be well aware of the melancholy. Depression was a sickness of the author's mind, but it was also the driving force of passionate writing. The relationship between melancholy and allegory in Kim Yu-jung's self-narrative "toad" and "life companion" is understood from this point of view. The two protagonists of self narration emerge as representations of depression, and in their allegorical intuition, Ok-hwa("toad"), Na Myeung-ju and mother("life companion") are objects of depressive identification. The letter is a sequel to the hero's persistent passion for her, and it becomes an allegorical form with an arbitrary meaning separated from its original meaning. The unusual narrative situation of the appearance of two voices of self narratives is related to the characteristics of depression associated with excessive reflection. Excessive contemplation implies a relentless attitude toward oneself. The voice of the reason and the voice of the emotion relentlessly express the confused heterogeneous feelings and contradictory behaviors of the depressed person. Also, the confrontation between persistent enthusiasmand endless decadence leads to panic and ironic sadness, which are followed by mad violence and a tragic catastrophe. It is difficult to grasp self-reflection in melancholiker's emotions as a subject with total, harmonious and complete identity. Even if self-reflection reaches the process of unification through the process of dialectic, it is the sum of a moment and the object of the skeptical. It is premised on the process of infinite dialectic. Rather, in the process of infinite dialectic, the temporal sum collapses, resulting in meaninglessness and emptiness. Contradictory ambivalence and contradiction, the fundamental nature of melancholy, make it possible to skept and deny the possibility of a single reflection. In this sense, the melancholider's self-consciousness of "life companions" is closely related to the modern consciousness that denies the total ideal of classicalism. According to Kristeva, the era of witnessing the fall of religious and political idols is a particularly beneficial time for melancholy. In times of crisis, depression takes the initiative, tells self-story, creates self-pedigree, and produces self-representations and knowledge. Kim Yu-jung, who lived in the era of colonialism as an intellectual, lived in this era of crisis and could have looked at reality and self in depressed emotions. "Toad" and "life companion" are self narrative texts that can be read in the same context. Especially Two text is equal value to proposition that allegory subject are melancholiker.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.