The narrative structure of the unconsciousness in The Story of Sim Cheong

Abstract

The narrative structure of The Story of Sim Cheong exists on two levels: the narrative structure of the surface and the narrative structure of the unconscious ness in my terminology. The former is deduced from the content of the work corresponding to the concept of objective physical reality, and the other to the concept of psychic reality according to Freud. I see that the heroine Cheong was in an incestuous love relationship with her blind father nicknamed Sim Bongsa – Sim being his family name, Bongsa meaning the blind person – at the unconscious level. Their relationship became an incestuous symbiosis in which they are indispensable to each other. However, there is a break-up of their intimate relationship between father and daughter due to her abandonment by her father. This abandonment results in turn by her abandoning him; there is a mutual abandonment between the father and the daughter. A psychoanalytic study leads us to discover the narrative structure of the unconsciousness of The Story of Sim Cheong: being abandoned by her father and abandoning him from the perspective of the daughter.