Earticle

초록

영어

John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” has been stigmatized as someone who “unlived” his life and as a man “to whom nothing was to have happened.” The long-standing images of Marcher as a failure and an outcast prevented the reader from appreciating the story in a more positive light. Going deeper into the interior of the seemingly uneventful existence of John Marcher, this paper explores how the protagonist can emerge as quite a contrary figure. The premises of the paper are that John Marcher embodies desires for ideals and a type of self-affirmation within his passivity. The metaphor of the “beast” and the “jungle,” then, becomes a place where these new paradoxical possibilities can be explored and examined. The paper discusses that such desires and struggles have been associated with homosexuality, existential anxiety, and other conditions of life, embodied in the haunting images of the beast. However, the jungle remains open for other possibilities and interpretations as well. John Marcher was not just a failure but was somebody who was caught and battled between the ideals and the mundane; the grand and the trivial. In his own way, John Marcher sought ways to live a fuller life, striving for the ideals rather than the mundane. One might call Marcher a philosopher or a prophet but, certainly, he was not a total failure.

목차

I. 들어가는 말
 II. 무(nothingness)와 공(futility)의 역설적 의의
 III. 야수 : 텍스트/가공된 진실
 IV. 의미생성 공간으로서의 야수와 정글
 V. 나가는 말
 인용문헌
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 노은미 [ Eun-Mi Noh ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813