<별사>의 해석과 ‘시간 기점’

Abstract

This paper is a essay seeking a reasonable way to read time in novel. I set the concept of ‘time datum’ and study its usefulness by applying this to the short story Byeul-Sa(Farewell Words, 別辭) written by Oh Jeong-hi. Time datum indicates time points which would be the criteria on each level of story and discourse. Story-time datum is a starting point or the point of time that readers set as a standard, reconstructing story. And discourse-time datum is the basic point of time at which the narrator is considered as being narrating. The setting of these two time datums varies by the narrative form and understanding of central events, and they might not be set explicitly in every type of novel. In Byeul-Sa, the stories of wife and husband intersects both depicting the event happening ‘today’ so that it is hard to set its temporal context. There has been efforts to solve this problem by setting a discourse-time datum at some point of time after ‘today’, but they do not fully go with the structure of the work and its form of narrating. The problem above can be solved when the description of the day before the disappearance of husband is thought as the result of ‘imagining behavior’ of wife. It is appropriate to be thought that story-time and discourse-time go together from ‘today morning’ which is the time datum of the event that wife gets back from the cemetery. Jeong-ok found the freedom from compulsion caused by her husband in the process of story development. This internal change is possible due to the behavior of imagining her husband’s last whereabouts; here, the narrative situation goes beyond story-time since it is made up by Jeong-ok. Therefore, in this essay, wife and husband can perceive and narrate ‘together’, and two ‘todays’ can exist. The imagining behavior of Jeong-ok, which set ‘today noon’ as its starting point, is a ritual of ‘leaving husband’ and its result is just Byeul-Sa which is a farewell words. Thus this behavior forms the central event of this work which is ‘keeping husband-leaving him.’ This work reveals the political violence devastating human beings by letting reader's experience it. This interpretation sets the concept of time datum to analyze the way of using time more explicitly than ever, and I think it leads us to a more reasonable consequence.