Social Values In Master Yun's Peace Under Heaven

The author of “Peace under Heaven” demonstrates how a family of capitalists with falsified idea of social values goes to decline during the Japanese colonial period through depicting the personalities of four generations of Yun’s family. The author uses the satiric literary technic to describe the main protagonist, Master Yun, the typical capitalist living in the Japanese dominated Korean society. Master Yun only concerns his own self interests and discards the real threaten toward his own race and the whole Korean society from Japanese empire. He mistakenly thinks the Japanese dominated society is a peaceful world, which entirely contradicts the pure desire of Korean race. The son of Master Yun, Ch’angsik is a character only chasing

The focal point of this story is Master Yun. In the story, the argumentative conversation between Master Yun and rickshawman indicates the personality of Master Yun that he is a person who values money more than himself. The author portrays him as a greedy and shameless individual, he even bargains 5 chon fares with the rickshawman. From this, it can be seen that the author implicitly delivery a message to his audiences that Master Yun might use this kind of strategy to accumulate his wealth. Additionally, there is an interesting scenario how Master Yun wants to use lower-class ticket to sit at the high-class area. He tries to replace the concepts of high class and low class when he argues with the staff at the festival, “down here is high-class, you say? And up there is lower-class?” (26 Chae). The conversation between him and the staff mirrors that he is a material and unreasonable person. The author seems to introduce the subtitle of this story “Let Everyone Else Go to Hell”(30 Chae). The author uses ironic tone here to judge the egoism prevailing in landlord class during the Japanese colonial