The Land one of the most loved novels by Korean people. Depicting the deep resentment of Korean people, the masterpiece of Park Kyung-ri is a historical epic novel and family novel that will leave its everlasting marks in the history of Korean literat...
The Land one of the most loved novels by Korean people. Depicting the deep resentment of Korean people, the masterpiece of Park Kyung-ri is a historical epic novel and family novel that will leave its everlasting marks in the history of Korean literature. Consisting of five parts and 16 volumes, the work is characterized by others'identity and orientation toward others through the wandering and drifting of youths of a colonized country, who are others in the empire, and also by traveling, drifting, and migrating for cultural thinking and ego search. The work contains contemporary meanings that are still reinterpreted today beyond the years before Liberation. Which is its background, because it has the Korean diaspora issue and beyond-border migration motif that have recently captured limelight. This study set out to focus on Jugap, Ogada Jiro, Song Yeong- gwang, and Lee Sang-hyeon that have failed to attract attention among approximately 600 attractive and original characters in the work and investigate their traveling, wandering, and drifting, the yoke of the times at the center of discrete life, and the substance of futility and pessimism. Both Song Yeong-gwang and Lee Sang-hyeon are decadent nihilists in that they fail to overcome the limitations with their social classes and their fathers and build a true family and escape to decadence, corruption, traveling, and artistic acts. One might blame the youths of the colonized country for their lives involving no accomplishment in terms of nation, love, and art and wandering around, being desperate and enraged, but the author understands and accepts them from an affectionate standpoint and depicts them as attractive and beautiful beings. Ogada Jiro is the only Japanese person positively described by the author that had a negative view of Japan and Japanese people. He is a cosmopolitan armed with multicultural global citizenship and an anarchistic tendency. Loving Joseon woman and Joseon itself and criticizing his fellow Japanese men and Japan, he rejects family, residence, and settlement and orients himself toward daily life based on traveling. Involving ongoing doubt, reflection, and self-examination as an imperial intellectual, his traveling is based on the yoke of the times. In the novel, he is depicted as an others-oriented, descent, and beautiful young man. A superhuman form of human as child and drifter, Jugap is a possessor of free spirit with cheerfulness, disinterestedness, laughter, transcendence, and naiveness. Transcending and overcoming poverty, social class, and reginal limitations, he evolves into a natural singer that can move the emotions of people and make his surroundings happy and enviable. Moving around and making adaptations as life dictates with no nation, family. and gaol, he is Ubermensch defined by Nietzsche and a being beyond the human level. Previous studies on The Land analyzed characters by dividing them into male vs. female and positive vs. negative figures, but the present study analyzed Song Yeong-gwang, Ogada Jiro and Lee Sang-hyeon and found that those characters that failed to form a family or settle down were the ones that the author oriented herself toward and understood. They are attractive and original characters that demonstrate that she was a great author. their lives are re-perceived as the aspects of the 21st century-nomads that have returned to nomadism again and contain more contemporary meanings and values than pre-modern and modern character groups that have taken root in history, motherland, or family. Represented by such images as drifters, orphans, boys, children, and rainbows, they are travelers and wanderers that fail to adapt to the contradicted colonial modern times and wander around like winds, clouds, and duckweed.