남성중심 질서에 대한 재고 - 팀 오브라이언의 「쏭 트라 봉의 연인」

Abstract

Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” has been mainly discussed on gender issue primarily because the story deals with the weird transformation of an innocent 17-year-old girl named Mary Anne Belle into a monstrous figure, who finally disappears into the Vietnamese jungle. Many critics have argued that Mary Anne’s changes suggest the transgression of gender role, that her monstrous feature reveals male fear of female warrior, or that her transformation reflects the indecipherable nature of war itself. All these arguments have their base on Mary Anne’s mysterious changes. Besides, this story has raised controversial issues due to the credibility not only of its narrator but also of its content. The narrator Rat Kiley is highly infamous for his exaggeration of what he is saying, and the story quite defies the expectation from the audience, who are quite used to the typical narrative structure that has a normal development and a clear ending. O’Brien presents a story that has no such clear development or ending in order to challenge the conventional conception of war. For O’Brien, war is not for men only. It surely affects both men and women, and what he tries to tell the reader is that the war experience accordingly is not for men only. The most important thing is the matter of degree to which either man or woman is willing to submerge themselves in given circumstances. That the male soldiers are unable to interpret Mary Anne’s changes suggests that their range of thought is confined within the familiarly classified or programmed logic, which is based on male-centered logic or language. A presence of a female in the so-called exclusively male area of war confuses the male soldiers when she violates the socially expected role as a typical woman. By presenting the male soldiers’ lack of proper words to describe and define Mary Anne’s transformation, O’Brien invites the reader to consider the limit of male-centered language, and thus of the male-centered order.