검은 깃발 아래의 패싱: 이창래의 󰡔척 하는 삶󰡕에 나타난 멜랑콜리아, 죄의식, 윤리적 책임 = Passing under the Black Flag: Melancholia, Guilt, and Ethical Responsibility in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay examines Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life through the interrelated concepts of passing, melancholia, ideology, and ethical responsibility. Focusing on Franklin Hata’s multilayered passing—from Korean colonial subject to Japanese imperial soldier and, later, to exemplary Japanese American citizen—this study argues that his identity is not merely a strategy of assimilation but a repeated “gesture” structured by melancholic loss. Drawing on Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia, Agamben’s account of unattainable objects of desire, Žižek’s theory of ideological identification, and Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia, the essay shows how Hata’s life is governed by impossible attachments to identities he has never fully possessed. His performance of model citizenship in Bedley Run conceals a profound ontological homelessness and an uncanny sense of non-belonging. At the center of this melancholic structure lies the death of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman whom Hata fails to protect. Her death becomes the unassimilable object of his guilt, symbolized by the recurring image of the black flag. The essay further analyzes how Hata’s failure to respond ethically to Kkutaeh is repeated in his relationships with Mary Burns and Sunny, where care is displaced by control, projection, and emotional evasion. Yet the novel does not reduce Hata to a simple perpetrator. Rather, it presents him as both victim and collaborator, exposing how imperial violence persists within memory, desire, and everyday performances of respectability. Ultimately, A Gesture Life asks how historical violence can be acknowledged when testimony remains incomplete and guilt remains unresolved.