신경다양성 서사의 인식론적 불안: 『몰로이』와 『한밤중에 개에게 일어난 의문의 사건』에 나타난 장애 내러티브의 비교

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes disability not as a representational theme but as a structural force that reconfigures narrative form and epistemological conditions in literature. Extending Ato Quayson’s concept of aesthetic nervousness, it introduces epistemological nervousness to describe how neurodivergent cognition disrupts dominant narrative logics. Through a comparative reading of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the study shows how neurodivergent narration destabilizes conventional frameworks of coherence, causality, and knowledge. The analysis addresses three dimensions: narrative voice and focalization, temporal organization and world-construction, and readerly cognition. Whereas Molloy enacts narrative collapse through uncertainty, memory erosion, and bodily disintegration, The Curious Incident constructs an excessively ordered cognitive world shaped by rule-based autistic perception. Despite their opposing aesthetic strategies, both texts unsettle normative assumptions about narrative intelligibility and epistemic authority. By relocating disability from the level of content to that of narrative epistemology, this paper argues that neurodivergent narratives do not merely represent cognitive difference but formally produce it. In doing so, they compel readers to recalibrate interpretive habits and acknowledge neurodivergent worldmaking as a legitimate epistemological practice rather than as deficit.