“ Beyond Emotional Silence: A Comparative Study of Alienation, Identity Crisis, and the Construction of the Self in Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human and Sohn Won-pyung’s Almond”

This study offers a comparative analysis of alienation, identity crisis, and self-construction in Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human and Sohn Won-pyung’s Almond, examining how both novels depict protagonists estranged from authentic selfhood within oppressive social structures. Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “true self” and “false self,” this paper explores how Yozo and Yunjae construct performative identities to survive social expectations, masking inner emotional voids. Karl Marx’s alienation theory further illuminates how both characters experience estrangement from society, others, and themselves as products of dehumanizing conditions—whether historical trauma or neurological difference. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist framework contextualizes their struggles toward authenticity, freedom, and self-definition amid absurdity and isolation. Despite differing cultural and historical contexts—postwar Japan and contemporary Korea—both narratives converge in portraying emotional silence as both wound and defense. This study argues that alienation, though painful, becomes a site of potential selfhood reconstruction. Furthermore, this comparative framework reveals how each author employs narrative form to mirror their protagonist’s psychological fragmentation. Dazai’s confessional, diary-like structure in No Longer Human enacts Yozo’s disintegration through fragmented, self-deprecating narration that blurs the line between author and character, while Sohn’s use of a medically distanced, almost clinical first-person voice in Almond reflects Yunjae’s alexithymia and his gradual, halting movement toward emotional recognition. Both texts resist conventional redemption arcs, instead offering ambiguous or incomplete resolutions that align with existentialist notions of perpetual becoming rather than fixed identity. By juxtaposing a mid-twentieth-century Japanese narrative of moral and social collapse with a twenty-first-century Korean narrative of neurodivergence and empathy, this study demonstrates that emotional silence functions not merely as pathology but as a culturally coded response to systemic alienation. Ultimately, the comparative lens underscores literature’s capacity to articulate the unspeakable, positioning both novels as critical texts for understanding the intersection of selfhood, affect, and social estrangement across divergent literary traditions.

کلیدواژه ها:

alienation ، identity crisis ، true self/false self ، existentialism ، emotional silence