『나목』에 나타난 도시 서울 표상 연구 : PX를 중심으로 = A Study on the City Seoul Representation in The Naked Tree : focused on PX

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper attempts to understand the basis for Seoul, which was a desolate ruin, to play the role of an urban space with its own rhythm by analyzing PX and Myeong-dong areas in The Naked Tree.
During the Korean War, the PX area was a place where the commercial district was actively formed as business for U.S. soldiers. However, the PX experienced by the main character Lee Kyung is a linear rhythmic space where people who work there, including herself, commute every day. Sales girls and portrait-painting employees who work at PX are paid weekly, and cannot be paid when they are not working. In the novel, PX and Myeong-dong are described as places full of bright lights. The colorful lights that illuminate the streets in the evening are another characteristic of the city. It greatly changes the linear rhythm that maintains the daily lives of urbanites. The novel highlights the brightness of PX by repeatedly depicting the high street in Gye-dong, where Lee Kyung lives, as a haunted house.
However, PX and Myeong-dong, which seem to be full of life, are actually counterfeit spaces. The novel shows through toy chimpanzees that PX and Myeng-dong are the places that brings ennui and cliché. Ok Hee-do captures the rhythm of ennui and decides to escape from PX and become a real artist even for a moment. When Lee Kyung reminds herself of the memory of their death and faces it, Lee Kyung leaves PX and moves on to her real life.