『톰존스』에 나타난 인간성 = Plot and Humanity in Tom Jones

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

As far as most modern readers are concerned it is not Fielding moral but his literary point of view which is open to objection. Fielding's primary aim is certainly not to reveal character through speech and action. Fielding's conduct of the action, despite a few excrescences such as the interpolated story of the Man of hill, and some signs of haste and confusion in the concluding books, exhibits a remarkbly fine control over a very complicated structure. The structure of fielding's novel is distinctive combination of elements. His comic plots are elaborate and contrived, but within them there is room for the casualness of picaresque incident, In Tom Jones, society and the larger order which it represents mast have priority and the plot's function, therefore, is to perform a physical rather than a chemical change: It acts as a kind of magnet that pulls every individual particle out of the random order brought about by temporal accident and human imperfection and puts them all back into their proper position.
The account of Fielding's work here attempted may lightly be condemned as too moralistic ; but it's view is that Fielding was fundamentally a moralist. If we are to discuss the art of an author, or the form and humanity which he impresses on his material, it seems a necessary preliminary in the case of an intellectual novelist to see how far his opinions shape his work, both as a whole and as seen in individual episodes. Fielding paid much attention to constructing to many examples of the various typical characters and episodes and events in his novels so as to satire the social evils and promote the righteous morals of the time and finally present the most rational human nature. Fielding's social philosophy is founded upon the concept of a stratified society, such as might constitute a small section of the great scale of being. Fielding's central idea, then, concerning the relation of the classes to each other would be the concept of all classes working together for the good of the whole. The plot of Fielding's novel faces two direction. From one side it looks like a forced solution, from the other an open question. With regard to the psychology of the individual moral agent, to which we may now pass, Fielding's centural position is not difficult to discern. He is devoted to the portrayal of what he called good nature. It is true that man even apart from his specialized social function may be bad in himself or good in himself. Fielding does not accept any doctrine of the natural goodness of all men. he gives us strong pictures of human malignity in Blifil and Jonathan wild, but his major concert in his fiction is the dramatization of good nature. The constitution of the particles themselves - the character - is not modified in the process, but the plot serves to reveal something much more important -the fact that all human particles are subject to an ultimate invisible force which exists in the universe whether they are there to show it or not.
Such plot reflects the general literary Strategy of neoclassicism. At the end of Tom Jones we feel we have been exposed, not merely to an interesting narrative about imaginary persons, but to a stimulating wealth of suggestion and challenge on almost every topic of human interest.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ.서론
• Ⅱ.Tom Jones에 나타난 인간성
• Ⅲ.결론
• <참고문헌>