『황폐한 집』의 구조 연구: 상호연관성의 주제를 잡아주는 도구

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is unique among his novels because of its structure: that is, this second longest novel by Dickens has two different narrators who tell us the same events and characters. One is a third-person omniscient narrator and the other Esther, the main character. The third-person offers the bleak and stagnant reality of Victorian London in the present tense, and Esther tells of events related to her in the past tense. Dickens’s contemporary reviewers usually saw this then-new characteristic a critical weakness of the novel. However, it is the very strength that gives the novel a status of one of the best literary works in English. The novel exposes the irresponsibility of the government and the upper classes toward the poor. Their indifference derives from a general idea that they are unrelated to the poor. In this novel, Dickens seriously criticizes this idea and encourages them to feel sympathetic to the poor, showing the interconnectedness of all the people and events that initially seem disconnected. The dual structure effectively realizes Dickens’s intention. This paper traces how the two narrators help develop the theme of interconnectedness. (Chungnam National University)