Searching for Self-Identity in the Tower of Babel: Self-Identity Search and the Korean-American Literature

In the 1990s, Native Speaker* by Chang-rae Lee not only raised the awareness of the Korean-American literary world following a decade of many Korean-American novels' publication, but also offered a fresh take on the theme of self-identify search. The first attempt at incorporating a quest for self-identity into the Korean-American novel was made in the 1930s with Young-Hill Kang's work**, and subsequently, this theme had been a mainstay in the Korean-American literary world well into the 1980s. The search was however more refined through the process of internalization by Chang-rae Lee's arrival. His novel clearly exhibits its possibilities as a serious literary piece and shows the process toward achieving the American dream. It captures the author's desire in harmonizing immigrants' voice and placing them in his own narrative structure. What's more essential is however how the protagonist's linguistic inferiority complex or frustration contributes to the story's development, in which his search for self-identity takes place.