종의 종교적 상징과 구원의 수사학 : 아이리스 머독의 『종』 The Bell of Iris Murdoch = The Religious Symbolism of the Bell and Its Rhetoric of Salvation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The rhetoric of salvation in The Bell of Iris Murdoch, a female writer, is achieved through a humanized level of love in the legend of the bell even if various religious colors are significantly observed from the Abbey and the Imber Court, a religious community seeking out a self-supporting and self-sufficient principle for living. This is due to a rhetorical structure which attempts to maximize the meaning of spiritual salvation. The structure runs with the dual system of metaphor and metonymy: form these two different rhetorical concepts, a feminine narrative is developed along with male voices. The narrative structure which seems to be the least religious develops sith the system of metonymy and metaphor. A metonymy, that is the whole story of the novel, develops with female characters trying to achieve a true love: at the same time, the metonymy of the feminine story functions to work out the metaphor of religious salvation, which is the most effective to male characters trying to live ideally and perfectly in the world.
The way of the story to spiritual salvation refers to the form of a religious ritual, as if a nun in the legend of the bell gets sublimed towards a purest soul through death even though her secular love appears to be very problematic to the religious order. Likewise, characters in the Imber community, who have a lot of troubles inthe world with sinful lives, achieve the way to spiritual awakening, changing their physical appearance to spiritual reality. So, the life and death of the nun functions as an metaphor for individual characters: they get changed through spiritual death by virtue of the legend of the bell. Also, the legend of the bell functions as a metonymy, a context of the narrative of the novel, yet it functions as a metaphor to purify individual souls physically and spiritually in the narrative of the story. No doubt the bell indicates the symbolism of religious salvation within the rhetorical structure of metonymy and metaphor, prevailing in the whole story of The Bell.