『인도로 가는 길』: 이성, 감성, 영혼의 대화

A Dialogic Approach to A Passage to India

This essay aims to apply Bakhtin's literary theory to E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. This work is found to have three dialogic dimensions: the voices of intelligence, emotion and soul. Forster seems to try to find out a 'inner harmony' through the dramatization of these voices. The voice of emotion is embodied in Aziz. His love of dead wife and Mosque shows this. On the other hand, Adela and Fielding represent the voice of intelligence. They try to explain their life and India by reason. All of them have a goal in common to communicate, make friends and understand the world. Their journey to the Cave is a process of knowing and becoming something new. But their efforts to know the real India is doomed to a failure. The cave represent nothing, which is beyond their abilities of reason and emotion. Their experiences in the cave bring them to the destruction of their friendship, religion and conduct. The temple section shows the complete circle of life. The festival of Gokul Ashitami blend the opposite elements of life to make a inner harmony of art. The order and the disorder, the clean and the dirty, the reason and the emotion coexist in the festival. Aziz and Fielding is connected again by the voice of Mrs. Moore's soul. In this work, man's efforts to communicate and find an order make a small circle and repeated endlessly. Every character's voice claims its own right and make its own world, communicating a sense that life is valuable for its own sake.