SORRY! The questions didn't post on Friday for some reason--re-posting them now! :)
Answer two of the following as usual:
Q1. Throughout the story, Hong Gildong claims that he "received the command of Heaven and came here on a righteous cause" (68), and yet the king and his family constantly bewail his faithlessness and criminal behavior. So how does the story want us to read him: as a 'god' like Rama, or a trickster figure, more like Ravana?
Q2: At one point, Hong admits that "Because of some guilt I had to bear from my past life, I was born of a servant girl and was not allowed to address my own father as Father and my older brother as Brother" (46). If his birth is the result of karma, are his deeds in this life virtuous attempts to recoup good karma and advance his station in the next life? Or is this an excuse to cover his misdeeds? (we might consider his much we trust him in general--is he yet another Odysseus?)
Q3: If we read this story as a didactic text, one that uses Hong Gildong as the cultural embodiment of a hero beyond caste and class, what makes him "good" or "laudable"? What qualities do you think the culture prizes and celebrates in the story? Or do they, like the Greeks, simply enjoy hearing about a hero who defies the very ideal of heroism? Is he an Eastern anti-hero?
Q4: At the end of the story, Hong Gildong takes leave of his kingdom with the philosophic statement: "I see that a human being is as insignificant as a single piece of grain on a vast ocean, and that a lifetime can pass in the blink of an eye..." (76). Do you feel this ending was an attempt by a later author to add a moralistic or even religious framework to a simpler oral narrative? Or does this philosophic intent emerge throughout the text, making it more than an exotic folk-tale?
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