미국 소설 속 한국 전쟁: 실존주의에서 소수자 초국가주의 공동체까지

초록

This essay aims to investigate two Korean war novels written by Korean or Korean-American writers in English: Richard Kim’s The Martyred and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered. Despite a temporal gap, both novels delve deeply into the atrocious reality of the Korean War with finesse. However, the two novels illustrate different perspectives of the war. Richard Kim’s The Martyred foregrounds existentialism and absurdity, which were popular in the 1960s. Anonymous and typical characters in The Martyred represent every man in the war. All characters in the novel struggle to find a way out of the meaninglessness of the world in which the war demolishes humanity. Chang Rae Lee’s The Surrendered transcends the contradiction of the local background and global theme in The Martyred by expanding the scope and themes covering the brutal war scenes and post-war traumas each character in the novel suffers from. The Surrendered projects a minor transnational community where June, Hector, and Sylvie present testimony of the wars as well as a potential healing process through empathy.

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