『미국의 아들』, 『원어민』에 등장하는 ‘비오스와 조에’: 존재론적(Bios), 기능적(Zoe) 존재

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Richard Wright’s Native Son and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker from the perspective of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. These two novels have been commonly known as Bildungsroman in which the main characters experience racial conflict and find their identities through mental or emotional transformation obtained in their relationships with the surrounding society. Through their work, Richard Wright has revealed the tragic problems of racial discrimination caused by White community and explored the hardships which African-Americans had suffered in many ways, exposing the negative consequences of the discrimination to the public. If two previous novels by black writers concentrated on shedding light on the negative effects and destructive aspects caused by racial prejudice, such as the impossibility of identity building and of identity searching, during the time when racism was more overt and systematic, Chang-rae Lee’s novel has excluded many elements of racial discrimination based on skin color throughout the story. The precedent studies on these works, as above, have focused on the problems of identity experienced by people of color and immigrants: the ‘absence’ of humanity, the ‘exclusion’ from society, and the challenge of finding identity shown by the cultural ‘hybridity’.