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초록

This paper analyzes Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest as a radical intervention in the tradition of detective fiction, challenging the genre’s conventional reliance on moral certainty, rational investigation, and narrative closure. Rather than restoring order, the Continental Op operates within a world already saturated with systemic corruption and ethical decay. Set in the fictional town of Personville—renamed ‘Poisonville’—the novel constructs a social landscape in which institutions are compromised, identities fragmented, and violence normalized as a structural condition. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jacques Derrida, this study argues that Red Harvest stages the contradictions of modern capitalist society through the breakdown of epistemological and ethical foundations. The Op’s fluid subjectivity, instrumental use of violence, and performative morality reflect a context in which traditional notions of justice and truth have lost their coherence. His role is not to uncover hidden truths, but to navigate and manipulate existing power structures—collapsing the distinction between detective and criminal, resolution and escalation. The novel’s refusal of closure, its embrace of fragmentation and repetition, and its ethically ambiguous narrative mode render Red Harvest not only a critique of modernity but a literary enactment of its disintegration. In doing so, it redefines the role of the detective and the genre itself.