『분노의 포도』의 대화적 서사구조 = Dialogic Narrative Structure in The Grapes of Wrath

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath(1939) has sometimes been regarded as a proletariat novel because it reports the unfair violence of the haves of the 1930`s in America and also provokes the have-nots into upheaval . However, in this novel there underlies a strong stream of pure humanism, which calls for the human remedy for the human problems more than anything else. Thus, through the breaches of the symmetrical literary styles, this work maintains that the problem caused by human beings must be solved by human beings through the recover of the human love, sheer humanism. This paper therefore aims to analyze the dialogic symmetry in the narratives between the main chapters and interchapters of The Grapes of Wrath, which the author used to reveal the humanistic theme of the novel, that is the quest for the consideration of the ‘Other.’ For this purpose, the dialogic theory of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, one of the Russian theorists, is used as a paradigm of criticism. Bakhtin’s theory is composed of such elements as “unfinalizability,” “polyphony” and “carnival,” which are sufficiently applicable to the analysis of the narrative of this work. First of all, this novel is not about the final destination but the course on the way to paradise, which is not yet finished so it is “unfinalized.” Second, there is a dialogue between the discourse of the main chapters and that of the interchapters, with the diverse voices of many people, whose discourses including news reports, advertisements, grammatical speech and ungrammatical dialects can be heard by the reader, resulting in a polyphonic effect in the novel. All the discourses contribute to maintaining the dialogicity and the tension of the novel, which accordingly keep the balance of its structure. Additionally, the world which the Okies are pursuing is a polyphonic world, where all human beings including both rich and poor can enjoy their lives just as they do at a carnival. In brief, the dialogic narrative structure in The Grapes of Wrath artistically embodies the manifestation of the human condition during “hard times,” and the urgency of a subsequent human philosophy, including the consideration of the ‘Other.’