ABSTRACT

We think that there is something typically and timelessly Korean about the relationship between the people in that story, a humaneness in people’s attitudes to each other, an attempt to get along together happily somehow in a very difficult world. We hope that the story simply gave pleasure in the reading, but we would like now to turn to the perhaps academic, but we think important question of placing it in its context. For, though it is a typical Korean story in its way, it is not actually typical of the stories which we find in the couple of hundred books containing stories in Korean which we can still find from the 19th century.