‘총알’과 ‘머루’의 상호텍스트성 - 오영수 소설에 나타난 ‘전쟁과 평화’ -

초록

Young-soo Oh has been known as a writer who immersed himself in lyrical tranquility; he has been taken as an exemplary writer who distanced himself from war experience and terrifying reality and portrayed idyllic humanism. However, it is not easy to oversimplify his literary world if we consider his biography and the socio historical context of Korean society in which it is grounded. “Wild Grapes,” which was written before Korean War broke out, impressively juxtaposes a bullet and wild grapes; a bullet, fired by a partisan, perforates wild grapes symbolizing peace and love, which leads us to see war scenes in reality. After investigating the issue of war amid tranquility, Oh delved more into the dreadful wounds from a war in the fictions such as “The Eastern Front,” “Afterwards,” “Episode of Tomorrow” and “Hantan River”. As explicitly shown in “Afterwards,” Oh foregrounds the human longing for peace while he depicts war scenes. In “Hantan River,” the main character, who crossed the north‐south border and moved to South Korea, reveals the entanglement of war and peace through his love and its failure. The motif of interplaying war and peace recurs in “Blood,” “Old Man Odo,” “Bird,” and “The Will of Anna”. The writer investigates in those works how war experience and separation of North Korea and South Korea have damaged and distorted the well‐being of humanity. What we have to pay attention to is his perspective on the entanglement of war and peace and the sympathy shown in “Migratory Birds,” “Echo” and “Hak do Park”. The focus at which the writer gazes, or the origin of the sympathetic perspective, is the silhouette of wild grapes perforated by a bullet. The focus is where a multi‐faceted prism inflects the spectrum of war and peace. His ecological imagination shown in most of his works – e.g. “Letters from a Remote Village” – and his desire to go back to nature result from the endless nostalgia for the love in the village of wild grapes before being perforated by bullets. The fictions of Young‐soo Oh mingle war and peace, sociality and lyricism, with civilization and nature. He is a writer who depicted more than mere farm villages.

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