Incident at Vichy에 나타난 인간의 파괴적 본성과 자각의 과정에 관한 연구

Abstract

Arthur Miller has attracted public attention since he published All My Sons(1947), which deals with the antagonism between a war supplier and his son; at the same time this work criticizes wars. After that, he won the Pulitzer Prize twice through Death of a Salesman(1949) and A View from the Bridge(1955) and then he became the most noticeable playwright in America. Miller mainly focuses on the relationship between humans and society, and is interested in exposing social irregularities. In addition, his concerns about relationships between individuals and the modern industrial society made him more absorbed in political and social issues. Based on his own experiences, he finds topics in his neighborhood and publishes works which many people can sympathize with. Through his early works such as All My Sons or Death of a Salesman, Miller shows that humans suffer because of the specific social system or political ideologies. Also naturally good individuals are sacrificed by powerful forces which they can't fight on their own. Therefore, he recognizes that society is at the center of human life, and human destiny is decided by society. However, as time goes by, a few changes come out in Miller's latter plays. In his works of the 1960s, Miller concentrates his themes on egocentric human nature based on his various experiences. He comes to find the cause of individual's mistakes in the inside world of humans, not in the outside world, such as within a social system. The reasons for the change in his point of view are due to Nazi's atrocious acts in Europe during World War Ⅱ and irrational McCarthyism in America in the 1950s. Especially, these kinds of changes of Miller's point of view are shown well in Incident at Vichy. Incident at Vichy is about the Holocaust, it represents human's evil and Miller makes people recognize the universality of evil in society through this work. Each character finds evil in his inside world and despairs but overcomes every existential situation in the end. In developing an aim of this thesis systematically, mood and theme of this play through Miller's sociologic background are examined in Chapter Ⅱ. Also destructive human nature and his existential way of life, and the process which main characters find evil in the real world, recognize it, and then overcome the stern realities of life are seen in Chapter Ⅲ and Ⅳ. In conclusion, this focuses on how Miller recognizes the essential meaning of evil and shows his ideas of sociologic matters.