구덩이 에 나타난 청소년문학 속의 고통 읽기 수업

Teaching the Meaning of Sufferings in Louis Sachar’s Holes

This paper examines the protagonists’ sufferings in Louis Sachar’s Holes and analyzes them in context of a Young Adult Literature class, which was taught in Daejin university. The class provided students with various themes to scrutinize the text from different points of views and found that most students enjoyed the topic of suffering. Therefore, the paper focuses on analyzing environmental, physical, personal sufferings from the hardships that the protagonists undergo in Camp. There seems to be a trend, which has become more apparent recently, of young Korean university students preferring the easy life and unwilling to commit to hard work or bouts of endurance. In a way, navigating their way through expectations and pressures of the demands of society is the fate of their generation. Young adult literature can put this potential social dilemma into context, as students can investigate their identities and developmental processes through various stories. Students’ opinions from the class were meaningful and thoughtful, as they learned to relate their sufferings to those present in the novel. The paper concludes that students can extract meaningful lessons relative to their real lives from class discussions of the protagonists’ sufferings.