The Ethics of Shame and the War Survivors: Focusing on Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered

Abstract

This paper explores that the shame persisted and maintained by the three war survivors in Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered is an ethical force arising from relationships with others, and it ultimately becomes a moral power to help and save others’ lives. The protagonists, especially Sylvie and Hector, suffer from war trauma, and they often find themselves into the passive and self-destructive state. However, the protagonists’ shame turns out to be a driving force of their moral actions since ‘the ability to feel and experience shame’ is an important factor to maintain humanity. The effect of shame underlying the passivity and self-destructivity of the protagonists made us think about humanity or dignity as a human being that even horrific war experiences could not completely destroy. Moreover, none of the three protagonists can properly express the tragedy of war they experienced because they can not express the ‘unspeakable things’ by words or writing. Even though the protagonists don’t have the ability to express the tragedy of the war they experienced, they are the ones maintained the ‘ethics of shame’ through the interlocking process of the subject-nonsubject-subject. This shows that human existence is constantly on the move and sways in the gap between the subject/nonsubject and humanity/inhumanity. Even in the world of metaphoric Auschwitz, where it is ‘always and already repeated’, the ethics of shame will remain persistently in humans and play a role in maintaining humanity.