Kyung sook Shin‟s Please Look After Mom: a Portrait of Alienation

Abstract

The present research aims at recalling different modes of alienation in Kyung- sook Shin‟s novel Please Look After Mom (2011).The research will explore Shin‟s characters of the novel applying Heidegger‟s ontological alienation and Jean Paul Sartre‟s ethical alienation; and other existential theories may be taken as a help. Heidegger‟s notion of alienation is a situation in which man forgets his own possibilities to be but tarries and dwells in his inauthenticity. Sartre‟s ethical alienation occurs when human beings refuse to accept „responsibility‟ for their own freedom. Kyung-sook Shin‟s characters‟ fail to be authentic in both Heidegger‟s and Sartre‟s notion, so are in dread, despair and alienation. At last the characters realize themselves as human being with individual „self