Bernard Malamud 의 Dubin's Lives : 이중생활의 갈등과 성숙 the Complications Caused by Dual Lives and the Moral Growth = A Study of Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The object of this paper is to present the main causes that lead to the hero's love affair outside of his marriage, and to examine the complications caused by his dual lives-one with his wife, the other with his ladylove, and his moral growth attained through them.
Dubin, the hero, the biographer, nearing 60 years of age, becomes weary of his long married life. His children are becoming more distant, and there are serious differences of temperament between him and his wife Kitty. In addition to this her neurotic attachment to the memory of her late husband sometimes offends his susceptibilities. The main reason for his affair, however, is his strong desire to experience sensuous pleasures before it is too late.
A casual acquaintance with a young college dropout, a plump beauty named Fanny, gradually leads to his infidelity and love affair. He takes her to Venice, where she, perhaps sensing he is using her only as a sexual object, outwits him. She avoids sex with Dubin though he soon discovers her making love with a young gondolier. Returning home he suffers greatly from the sense of being betrayed by Fanny as well as that of guilt stemming out of lying to his wife.
However, when he meets Fanny again the next summer he promptly drives onto the highway in the wrong direction. In a field they make love for the first time and the affair continues on and off for more than two years. Nevertheless he often feels guilty about his neglect to act faithfully as her guidence counselor in addition to his guilt concerning his wife. At the end Fanny resolutely leaves him, saying she is entitled to an open ordinary and satisfying life of her own.
Afterward she returns to the neighboring farm, which she had recently purchased, and capriciously resumes her affair with Dubin. In an effort to give her a new, useful life as she wished, he tries to arrange a legal career for her. She will be an apprentice to his wife's lawyer-friend, and in four years she will be able to take the bar exam. In his selfless devotion to help her become a lawyer, his moral growth as her counselor is clearly manifested for the first time.
While he is preoccupied with Fanny, Kitty has been having an affair with her psychotherapist for the last few months. Discovering her affair, he outlines the steps for divorce, but before he confronts her she confesses the affair. Realizing his own neglect as a husband, he forgives her and stops the divorce proceedings. His broad-minded act, hard to attain for ordinary husbands, evidences his spirit of tolerance and moral growth. His ability to attain moral growth and acquire such virtues as introspection and mercy, seems to derive in great part from Judaism, though he is not an orthodox Jew.
With a simple and realistic style Malamud vividly portrays the complications of the biographer s dual lives and the moral growth achieved through the process of his two and half years in the background of a small town in the 1960s.