시작과 끝 사이의 심연: 탄핵정국 이후 세월호 ‘인양’ - 『그날을 말하다』 구술증언록을 중심으로 -

초록

The years following the Sewol ferry disaster reveal not merely the passage of time but the widening interval between what can be spoken and what cannot. Drawing on the oral testimonies compiled in Telling the Day, this paper examines how victims’ families recalibrated their speech around the impeachment crisis of 2016–2017. As impeachment came to be socially framed as an “ending,” families found themselves tempering their own expressions, pressed into an affective terrain where anger, anticipation, urgency, and self-restraint coexisted uneasily. Even after the physical salvage of the hull, the absence of clarity—what had not yet been “raised” or “revealed”—intensified their sense of political, affective, and spatial isolation. Revisiting the layered meaning of inyang(引揚), this study extends the notion of salvage from a physical act to a process of illumination and mourning. It thus poses a renewed question: has Sewol truly been salvaged? As public discourse gradually shifted toward closure, the families’ experiences slipped from collective visibility, and the disappearance of memorial spaces translated into the erasure of presence itself. The testimonies demonstrate that the disaster remains in a state of “unfinished salvage,” demanding reconsideration of the unresolved conditions that shape not only the Sewol disaster but subsequent disasters as well.

키워드