영문초록
This paper focuses on Evelyn Waugh’s multi-layered satire uncovered in The Loved One: A Tragedy of an Anglo-American, a very puzzling, and rarely studied novelette, particularly in Korea. Waugh’s main object of ridicules in his burlesque is a materialized and meaningless modern world. Especially in the employment of Catholicism Waugh exposes false consolation and sham love within a hypocritical culture embodied in the Hollywood film industry and in a funeral company that is, ironically named, Whispering Glades. Waugh’s catholic allusions reveal complex and highly performative turns of dark humor, unveiling an apocalyptic vision of postwar Western culture, where human beings are merely reduced to consumables, living corpses, and even animals. Deeply rooted in fantasies of love and immortality, this modern society blurs the distinction between the living and the dead, and between humans and animals as well. Exploring the dynamic between love and death, pivoting around the main characters, the most important being Dennis Barlow, Waugh unfolds his double-edged satiric vision. Dennis is a personification of Waugh’s cynical and detached viewpoint, while he becomes the main target for Waugh’s most ironic satire, as he is being inextricably immersed in the deadly culture. Waugh’s modernist satiric approach is an envisioning of the ‘loved one’ within a grotesque and comic choreography of love and mortality, which both expresses and engenders moral outrage. (Chungnam National University)