나르시시즘적 나레이터: 『아들과 연인』의 구조적 아이러니

Abstract

This paper proposes to illuminate the construction of the narrative of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers in Freud's terms of "Narcissism". Readers of the text may confront several layers of discordance: between the main character's words and actions, between the character and the narrator, between the title of a few chapters and their contents, and between the writer's announced intention of the creation and the represented text. Explaining these discordances in terms of Narcissism will allow the readers to pierce into the unconscious of the text, and accordingly to comprehend the text not as a tragedy, as Lawrence himself intended, but as a novel with a hopeful ending. The main body of this paper examines the driving force of the text. According to Freud, the tenn Narcissism indicates the state in which one fixes his libido on himself identifymg his own self with his mother, as an infant. A child struggles to detach his "object libido" from his mother as he grows up. This paper pays attention to the dynamics of the psychological process through which the desire to overcome Narcissism and the desire to return to Narcissistic infancy contend incessantly with each other. This tension of the mechanism of Narcissism explains the structural irony of Sons and Lovers. In the text, the very existence of the character and the narrator produces structural irony. That the narratois voice reveals Paul's unconscious informs that the text represses the satisfaction of Narcissism and foregrounds the painstaking process of libidinal reestablishment. The ending in which the image of "the light" returns demands to be read as hopeful.