Exploring the Relationship between Humans and Animals through the Jine Gagsi tale

This article aims to explore the relationship between humans and animals inherent in the Jine Gagsi tale. Until now, this tale has been mainly discussed from the perspectives of gratitude, second-rate marriage, and transformation, because it is a story of a goose that transformed into a woman and formed a relationship with a man to achieving a certain goal with his help, and then repaying the man’s kindness. However, this article sets the goose that appear in the story in an animal form, and reveals certain important points in the relationship between humans and animals as embodied in the narrative. This tale comprises complex problems that humans experience in the process of living, such as poverty and death, abundance and life, the existing and the new order, man’s choice and the woman’s final achievement, etc., that are connected in a complex narrative context. Based on the narrative of this story, this work examines what should be the standard when humans establish and maintain relationships with animals of a different species, and the kind of situations humans and animals can ultimately pursue as a result. The protagonist of Jine Gagsi tale respects heterogeneous existence, resists the existing order, and values the results of interaction rather than the identity of the other person. Furthermore, he is a character who seeks stability through the continuation of relationships. Therefore, he can be said to be a being who seeks a world where humans and non-human life forms can coexist and coexist, breaking away from human-centered thinking. This tale also emphasizes to us that in order to become like the main character in Jine Gagsi tale, we must become beings with abundant inter-species literacy, that is, literacy about the natural environment where other species can coexist.