Stream of Consciousness, Absurdity, and the Flâneur in Jung Young Moon’s Vaseline Buddha Narrative

Abstract

This study examines Jung Young Moon’s essay Vaseline Buddha, focusing on its fragmented and chaotic structure shaped by the stream-of-consciousness technique. The text offers a narrative that foregrounds absurdity and the flâneur experience, exploring the modern individual’s search for meaning, the fragility of memory, and the absurdity of everyday life. The narrator’s mental and physical wandering materializes through journeys in cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Budapest, blending spatial experience with flâneur observation and reflective processes. Associations around ordinary or absurd objects—like the oleander flower, sleeping pills, cats, and goldfish—reveal experiences of placelessness, fractured identity, and the limits of language. The text unites the flâneur’s chance observations with the existential acceptance of the absurd, while its fragmented form aesthetically mirrors the vulnerability and disintegration of identity. By doing so, Jung Young Moon both extends the modernist stream-of-consciousness tradition and expands postmodern narrative possibilities. Vaseline Buddha emerges as an essay that addresses not only the dynamics of Korean literature but also universal existential concerns. The study employs close reading to unpack the linguistic and thematic layers of the text, highlighting the fragility inherent in the modern search for meaning, belonging, and identity.