The Korean War which broke out in 1950 made a deep impact on the Korean society. From the view of human losses, the war caused more than 5 millions’ death and more than 10 millions of people missing and separated from their families. Thus many Korean postwar novels confronted these tragedies by involving the theme about losses of family members. These novels usually focused on losses of parents, losses of husbands, and losses of children that hurt families greatly. Especially, as the male supporter of the family, the loss of fathers or husbands made their family members naturally sink into life and economic crisis. By analyzing the novels with the theme on family losses, the thesis tries to explore the damage the war made both on people and human nature, and meanwhile expound the meaning of novels of this kind in the Korean modern literature history.

Father is a very common literary imagery. Modern psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan considered “father as a metaphor” with symbolic significance. Based on the theories of Lacan, taking the imageries of father in Korean postwar novels as study objects, a detailed analysis has been made on the real-existing father imageries as well as the missing ones. It is found that the father imageries in Korean postwar novels generally are negative, and even more novels evade a direct presence of father or the symbolic imagery of father, i.e. “the name of the father”. It is visible that war has brought Korean society enormous changes, destroying the law and order embodied by father and people’s values . How to build the authority of the father and rebuild the social order has become a very important issue.