주인공의 더블 이미지(Double Images) 연구

The Protagonist’s Double Images in Early Morning, Lear and Narrow Road to the Deep North

Edward Bond is one of the leading British dramatists with a strong political and social tendency since 1960. Bond’s plays are concerned with the discord between the individual and society. Since institutions have lost their sense of human goals, they cannot be truly moral. In order to perpetuate their own privileged social status, they substitute social morality for true morality and use social myth and violence to enforce it. The individual, when faced with the limitation of circumstances, undergoes intense physical and mental anguish before he can relinquish the values of a repressive society in favor of those of a more humane system, and finally strives for a transcendental life. Bond not only exposes and analyzes the cause of the violence in society to deliver a political message, but explores the consciousness and emotions of the individual, by using a protagonist’s double images. Therefore, a protagonist’s double images are vitally important dramatic symbols and metaphors which provide the protagonist’s developing perception into physical, visual terms. Early Morning (1968), a bizarre depiction of Victorian society is a black comedy that visualizes socialization as a nightmare of cannibalism and shows the interaction between a perceptive individual and society. The play focuses on Arthur’s spiritual initiation from acceptance to rejection of the competitive society based on cannibalism. Arthur himself begins as a two-headed monster, tied to his Siamese twin George, Arthur’s alter-ego. Arthur and George are the moral and immoral halves respectively of the same character. In delineating Arthur’s moral development, Bond uses double images in the form of George’s bodily dismemberment and disintegration. As Arthur spiritually progresses, George physically diminishes. The Narrow Road to the Deep North(1968) is a simple parable based upon an incident in Japanese Haiku poetry, Matsuo Basho’s abandoning a baby to its death. Basho is the ivory-tower artist, an outsider, a philosopher of detachment who ignores reality to get enlightenment. Bond asserts that Basho’s disregard of the basic human instinct to protect children demonstrates that the society which is represented here is corrupt. Shogo was the abandoned baby by the river that Basho failed to save, and he has been left with an inexplicable guilt. As a dramatic character he is tied to Kiro, his opposite and complementary, as Arthur was tied to George. Kiro, the man of meditation, and Shogo, the man of action, are opposite halves of the same character. They are related in conflict and in attraction, embodying warring elements within one person. The progress of that person towards unity or self-knowledge involves the other in death. Kiro’s duality is reduced to a unity in a process of passage, an initiatory journey. On the one hand, Shogo functions in Kiro’s initiation as an exaggerated caricature, an embodiment of all that Kiro fears in social structure. After witnessing Shogo’s defeat, Kiro commits ritual suicide. The tragedy is that they couldn’t use each other’s powers. Bond, using the political and moral framework of Shakespeare’s King Lear, wrote a political drama, Lear, at whose center are a king, and his society, who both suffer a historical fate for which they are essentially responsible. Lear’s passage from the destructiveness of his power to moral maturity and tragic stature is the spine of the play. Only after great suffering, physical and emotional torments, does he achieve a state of understanding of humanity. Lear’s mental imbalance prepares the entrance of the Ghost of the Gravedigger’s Boy. The device of The Ghost of the Gravedigger’s Boy, Lear’s alter ego, escapism, subconsciousness, animal instinct, is a stylized externalization of the process of Lear’s initiation. The gradual decay of the ghost symbolizes the decay of Lear’s past values. As Lear progresses beyond his adherence to the past ideals, the