In the 1930s' Korean modern novels there appear a lot of ‘illness’ motifs. This phenomenon was not coincidental. The purpose of this critical essay is to elucidate the meaning of illness as metaphor appeared in the text of Korean major modern writers in the 1930s. Physical pain is associated with illness of the external world. Modern Korean intellectuals tended to perceive modernity as the other, which is, symbolically, represented as illness in th text. Intellectuals in the 1930s paid their attention to it and treated, metaphorically, illness as a kind of critical mechanism to modernity, in the modern times, the dominant conception of illness shifted from the passive to the active. The victim of illness was not merely a physical patient but a social being stripped of voice. The patient in the text tried to recover the lost voice, as a wounded storyteller, to tell social problems in the modern era. In short, ‘illness’ as metaphor works as a symbolical critique to the 1930s’ colonial society seeking for modernity enforced from the outside.