마크 해던과 박민규의 탈주의 놀이로서 글쓰기: 『한밤중에 개에게 일어난 의문의 사건』과 『카스테라』를 중심으로

Abstract

This essay explores the similarity and difference between Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Min-Kyu Park’s Castella. Their unusual fiction style earns them the self-designated title of “ruleless hybrid writer,” In Curious, the protagonist, Christopher Boone, is utterly unsuited to narrate a novel. He tells things how it is without stopping to think of other’s feelings. His autism stops him from feeling like normal humans do. However, we learn to admire and empathize with him because of his intellectual brilliance and his courage, evident through his detective sleuthing he undertakes to seek his mother. We see how this syndrome alters all perspectives of a person’s life; however, we also see how he faces his demons to find the truth. Park’s work has an unique world view that imagines allegoric fantasy or escapes the character from reality. As his writing style was so new, it sent shockwaves through the Korean literary world. Unusual metaphors and descriptions, sentences and paragraphs that ignored the rules of grammar, narrative structures that broke down logical causality, and characters that behaved in exaggerated ways like cartoon characters—there was no aspect of his writing that wasn’t unconventional.