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Paper short abstract

Korean and Japanese modern literary figures struggled to create colloquial-style sentences that matched spoken language. Through single pov, Iwano Hōmei and Kim Dong-in succeeded in vividly portraying the protagonist's inner world, thereby creating a new descriptive technique for modern J-K novels.

Paper long abstract

Early modern writers in Korea and Japan had to think in foreign languages rather than their native tongues in order to craft colloquial sentences. Through single pov, Iwano Hōmei and Kim Dong-in succeeded in vividly portraying the protagonist's inner world, thereby creating a new descriptive technique for modern Japanese and Korean novels.

The issue of how to use the third-person pronoun like "he" together with a subjective emotive verb in a single sentence is directly related to the establishment of single pov. By using the third-person instead of the first-person, the narrator and the protagonist do not completely overlap; a gap is maintained between them. Yet, the author attempts to portray the inner world of "him" or "her" while still referring to them in the third-person. Therefore, the method of single pov is a narrative technique that maintains both the subjectivity and objectivity of the character simultaneously.

In other words, single pov is a narrative device that prevents the narrator from being fully drawn into the character’s perspective, which includes the use of the third-person point of view—akin to an omniscient perspective—and the past tense. Through single pov, the narrator brings out the character’s voice without losing critical distance. Ultimately, the distance between the narrator and the character is secured by the use of the third-person and the past tense. This highlights the distinction between everyday language and literary language. The third-person and past-tense expressions seen in single pov, along with the absence of conjectural expressions, function as devices that signal fictionality. A narrative style in which the author hides their own presence, uses the third-person for the character, and simultaneously expresses the character’s inner world is a literary technique that represents both the truth and fiction of the novel’s world. It can also be described as a new form of confessional narrative through the third-person.

Ultimately, the unification of written and spoken language passed through the era of experimentation and expression in the modern literature and bore fruit.