The Self Shrouded in Fog: The Layers of My Ethics in the Novel A Trip to Moojin and the Movie Decision To Leave

There are quite a few discussions about the connection between Park Chanwook's film Decision To Leave and novelist Kim Seungok's A Trip to Mujin. A Trip to Mujin is a novel that has already been adapted into movies and dramas four times, and it is evaluated that the narrative and expression style of modern Korean novels have changed since this novel was published. The male characters in A Trip to Mujin and Decision To Leave are all successful middle-class elites who are socially recognized and have stable families. They meet a special woman in what is described as the fog space of Mujin and Ipoh and face an urge to break away from the existing world or to break it down. However, A Trip to Mujin's man escapes from the aspect of his desire self and returns to the family and workplace where his wife is located, returning to the ethical me. A man in Decision To Leave tries to get away from his existing life and plan a future different from that of a woman who resembles his original self, but fails. In the two works, the men are the figures of Odysseus who met the Siren, and they are characters who wander between his wife and other women and explore themselves. Accordingly, A Trip to Mujin and Decision To Leave can be said to be works with the characteristics of making women the other for the modern male subject who impulsively and returns between social ethics and personal ethics. The thoughts and wandering toward the existence of this modern male subject are effectively reproduced through an artistic device called fog, and the aspects of the multi-layered self are revealed or concealed in the fog, which can be said to be a metaphor for human conflict and agony toward me.