Lee Seung Woo persistently offers novelistic inquiries about what is God. His novels have consistently addressed this issue, and the main theme through all his novels has been the absence of father. From his earliest books until the book published in 2009, Hannaje Siseon(Mid-day’s Gaze), fathers have been portrayed as either castrated and ostracized or sadistic and pessimistic. In his literary works, protagonists could not resolve the Oedipus complex. In Hannaje Siseon, however, the protagonist resolved the complex. This change in his approach toward the Oedipus complex brings up the need to interpret Hannaje Siseon based on psychoanalytical theories. The purpose of this paper is to read Hannaje Siseon as a story about the Real with the special reference to the relationship between father and son. The resolution of the Oedipus complex is deeply related to the restoration of ego-identity, and the process of the restoration could be understood as the story of the self facing the real.This paper mainly consists of four main parts. First, the paper analyzes the cause of internal depression the protagonist suffers. The cause is related to the absence of father, but the protagonist’s realization of the cause plays a positive role in the restoration of ego-identity. Second, Father archetype, which unsettles the protagonist, will be analyzed. Third, the metaphor about the name-of-the-father will be analyzed to see how the self enters into the symbolic. Fourth, the process of the self interacting with the real will be analyzed by looking at the act of killing father in the protagonist’s illusion. The analysis on Hannaje Siseon indicates that Lee Seung Woo intends to show the process of the self finding the subject in the cultural context where father is absent. In other words, he shows the way of resolving the Oedipus complex to reach the real.

• 문용식 | Moon, Yoeng-sik