본 논문의 목적은 『연옥』에 나타난 문화적 쇠퇴 및․인종적 퇴보에 대한 우려에 대하여 논의하는 데 있다. 논문에서는 예이츠의 후기 시와 산문을 같이 살펴보면서 󰡔연옥󰡕을 아일랜드 독립 전쟁, 내전과 같은 1920년대에서 30년대에 걸쳐 일어난 역사적 변화에 대한 시인의 반응으로 보고자 한다. 이 중에서도 글에서는 ｢내전기의 명상｣과 On the Boiler를 통하여 극에 표현된 이러한 우려가『연옥』뿐만이 아니라 해당 시기 전체를 통하여 드러나 있는지 알아보고자 한다.

본 논문은 단테의 연옥에 등장하는 칠죄종(7대 죄악)이 현대판 신곡이라 할 수 있는 데이빗 핀쳐의 영화 <세븐>과 비교해서 훨씬 “열린” 문학적 공간에서 재현되고 있음을 보여주려고 한다. 단테의 열린 공간은 도덕은 진보한다는 믿음과 달리 현대적 영화의 공간보다 개방적이다. 연옥의 열린 공간에서 죄인은 자신의 죄에 대한 책임을 지고 고난을 통해 해방을 획득할 수 있다면, <세븐>과 같은 누아르 영화가 등장시키는 자본주의의 공간인 “닫힌” 현대 도시는 그 속에 거주한다는 사실로 인간을 영원한 죄인으로 가둔다. 이 열림과 닫힘의 역설적인 변화는 자본주의 발전을 변수로 하는 로그 함수의 그래프를 따르고 누아르 영화에서 재현되는 현대 도시는 이를 나타내는 대표적인 공간적 특징이라고 할 수 있다.

예이츠는 『연옥』에서 자신의 내세관을 구체적으로 재현하여 로마 가톨릭교회보다 더욱 체계적으로 영혼들이 어떻게 정화되는지를 제시하고 있다. 그 영혼의 정화 과정은 『비전』의 꿈으로 돌아가기와 회귀이다. 영혼들은 이 과정을 여러 번 반복하여 그들의 업을 정화하고 있다. 단테는 『신곡』의 “연옥”에서 교만, 질투, 분노, 나태, 탐욕, 탐식, 방탕의 삶을 살았던 영혼들이 자신들이 지은 업을 정결하게 하기 위하여 끔찍한 고통을 당하면서 그들의 죄를 정화하는 장면을 세밀하게 제시한다. 그래서 예이츠와 단테는 영혼들이 연옥에서 어떻게 그들의 죄 혹은 업을 정화하는지를 묘사하여 윤리적 삶의 중요성을 강조하고 있다.

예이츠의 작품은 다시 찾은 시공과 재창조된 시공에 존재한다. 창조된 시공은 현대시대에서 음유시인의 역할을 재상상함으로써 자신을 위해 만든 것이다. 1937 년 환상록을 완성함으로써 그의 작품은 전통적인 영원성의 시간개념(일순간 인식된 모든 시간)을 반영하기 시작할 뿐 아니라, 『창유리에 쓰인 말』과 『연옥』에서 보이는 현세적인 시간과 영원한 시간 사이에 존재하는 초자연적 시간도 반영한다. 이 초자연적 시 간은 보통 우리가 살아가는 시간보다 더 유동적이다.

프로이드의 무의식에 대한 설명 중 유년기에 존재하는 기괴함의 원인들 과 공포와 관련된 무의식이 나중에 성장해서 나타나는 방법들에 대한 설명은 기괴함의 효과가 나타나는 작품들의 장치들을 밝혀준다. 본 논문은 예이츠의 『연옥』과 『꿈꾸는 뼈들』을 프로이드의 기괴함에 대한 이론을 적용하여 프로이드적 관점에서 해석한다.

This paper aims to compare William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory from the perspective of the genealogy of the damned, the damned here being the Old South and the Protestant Ascendancy. For all their obvious differences, Faulkner’s Old South and Yeats’s Protestant Ascendancy share important features in common: the decline of aristocracy, the tendency to mythologize realities, and the sense of loss and self-loathing. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner attempts to retrieve the hidden history of the South from the early years of white settlement on the Mississippi, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the Civil Right era. Yeats’s Purgatory dramatizes recent Irish history, looking back on the Irish independence and the establishment of the Free State as the irrevocable proof of the decline and fall of the Protestant Ascendancy. Seeing the genealogies of the Sutpen family and the Old Man as a metaphor of American South and post-independent Ireland respectively, this paper explores transnational possibilities of reading American and Irish literature against each other.

Yeats and Murakami are writers who believe in spirits. They both treat them as if they are real. Yeats's Purgotory is a story of Father and Son, Father killing his own son to disrupt the cycle of Life that is tainted, whereas Kafka on the Shore is a story of Mother and Son, Mother causing all the tragedies in Kafka's father, sister, and himself. Kafka's mother is a person of Memory that stays constant, which is the origin of all the tragedies, and refuses to flow with time; and Son intervenes in her Fate, changing her and himself. The leitmotif of the novel is the Oedipus complex. In the meantime, Purgatory is a practice of Yeats's religious system of Life and humanity. In the play, the two kinds of people are illustrated by Father and Son; Father can see the invisible, ghosts, but Son cannot. The play is based on the conception of souls being born again and again in endless cycles. To disrupt it Father kills his own Son, as he had killed his own Father. It is beyond the moral of the world, killing his own son, following his own belief. Both works could be read as a metaphor of life. One relies on psychology, and the other relies on mythology. Murakami may have read Yeats, and Yeats might be interested in Murakami if he lived and read him. Murakami is in a position to deal with this kind of subtle subject in a subtle way, because he is a writer of the East well versed in the West. In the same way, Yeats was in a unique position, who was familiar with things eastern. Hence, their works manifest strong inclinations toward mysterious milieu, most prominently what is supernatural.

Purgatory includes as its main themes Yeats’s feeling of crisis and anxiety as an Anglo-Irish who was alienated from the Irish society, his skeptical view of the modern Ireland which was seeking after materialism and his predilection for eugenic thought. In Purgatory, Yeats reveals those representative themes of his later writing using the conventions of Gothic: for instance, the supernatural modes such as the transgression of the ancestors, whose tragic result affects the present, the ruined house, wild landscape, and the ghosts, the theme of ‘life in death’ and ‘the death in life’, the opposition of nature and culture and the Freudian psychological characteristics such as ‘the return of the repressed’ and ‘the uncanny.’ This paper aims to analyse how Yeats borrows and modifies those traditional Gothic conventions to convey his themes in a more effective and impressive way and to finally argue that Yeats came to be skeptical about the heroic theme and its representation. Yeats places the old man as a narrator who speaks for his thoughts, but at the same time he puts him as an unreliable narrator and shows us his limitation. Here arises irony, through which Yeats reconsiders his heroic theme that he has insisted throughout his lifetime. Through the old man’s failure to save his mother from her repeated pain of purgatory and his consequent helplessness, Yeats reveals the anti-heroic theme.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of W. B. Yeats’s penultimate play, Purgatory. It is a one-act verse play. There are only two characters: An Old Man and A Boy. Its story is simple. The Old Man tells his son (A Boy) of his family’s past: the mésalliance of his mother and his father’s squandering of everything she had, which he considers pollution to his family and declares as a capital offence. The Old Man kills his son with the knife he used to kill his father to stop the pollution from passing on to the next generation, and to stop the ‘Dreaming Back’ process for his mother. Purgatory is as much a play about the end of a historical cycle as it is a personal story. The obvious decline of the old man’s family fortune is an image of a ruined Ireland, its vigour spent and its thought forced in upon its own past. The qualities that have caused Purgatory to be one of Yeats’s most admired plays is the condensation and compression of his material, coupled with a lucid and immediately accessible realistic plot. The characters, actions and images are both natural and symbolic, moving and meaningful. The real strength of Purgatory lies in its unobtrusive poetic quality, the harmony of realistic subject matter and symbolist design within a lyrical composition of undoubted concentration and power. In Purgatory, more than anything else, Yeats solved the problem of speech in verse drama, which is one of his contributions to modern drama. Instead of contrasting voice patterns, he unified the action with a freely varied verse form in iambic tetrameters which is admirably suited to the terse, sharp idiom of modern speech. The most remarkable feature of this very natural verse form is its ability to reflect emotional intensification as the rising dramatic action moves through contrast and reversal to its inevitable climax.