Korean American Melancholia in Native Speaker

This paper explores Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker which is narrator Henry's melancholic memoir. Such a melancholic memoir represents a literary space in which the voices of lost objects or the dead erupt from the negative ground of humanity. Henry's melancholic memory is filled with moments that resurrect lost voices as traces from the Asian American experience of violence from racial history. This paper focuses on the cause of Henry's melancholia overdetermined by racial history and its victims including Henry's bi-racial son, Mitt and its ethico-ontological meaning. For this aim, this paper will take highly philosophical approach accounting for the ethico-ontological meaning of Henry's poetic articulation, which provide a new perspective to the universality and particuality a Korean American experiences. As theoretical scaffoldings, I use Giorgio Agamben's and Martin Heidegger's ontology and ethics as well as Walter Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's theories of melancholia.