Suddenly it occurs to you to wonder, when the body dies, what happens to the soul? How long does it linger by the side of its former home?
Dong-ho considers the relationship between body and soul upon death. This quote reflects a belief that the soul can exist apart from the body, and may eventually travel elsewhere or disappear entirely. Known as animism, the belief in souls plays an important role throughout the novel. Many characters contemplate what happens after death and whether there is an afterlife.
I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them, why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?
After he dies, Jeong-dae is seized with a fierce desire to confront his murderers and demand an explanation. He cannot fulfill this desire since his soul is initially tied to the area near his body. Jeong-dae remains trapped in this in-between place—unable to communicate with the living or the dead—for the entirety of Chapter 2, even when the soldiers set the pile of corpses on fire.
The censors had scored through four lines in the paragraph following that one. Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?
The publishing house where Eun-sook works is required to send all manuscripts to the censor's office for review. At various points in the novel, Han Kang connects literacy to humanity, so the fact that the censors flagged this quote demonstrates the dehumanization involved in the censorship process. The description "scored through" evokes a slight degree of violence. Even though this type of censorship does not physically harm people, Han suggests here that censorship has intellectual and spiritual consequences for humanity as a whole.
Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.
This quote concerns the lasting impact that trauma can have on an individual. It provides insight into the narrator’s inner state of mind after his time in prison and the death of his fellow organizer and prisoner, Jin-Su. Through the metaphor of lights going out, the narrator conveys the darkness that has taken over his life because of his traumatic experiences. He acknowledges that he is not a “safe person," meaning that he is unable to cope with his memories in a healthy way. The narrator’s reflection on his survival after Jin-su's suicide speaks to the psychological toll of trauma. The narrator’s guilt and confusion over his survival testify to the enduring effects of trauma as they continue to manifest in an individual’s life long after the initial event has passed.
I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race.
This statement speaks to the power of recognizing shared humanity. This is no easy or lighthearted task because the narrator in this chapter demonstrates that humans are capable of great cruelty. Rather than offer a definitive answer to the question of what humanity is in general, the narrator poses complex questions and cites historical examples of mass brutality. Everyone, then, is capable of the full spectrum of human experience (from dignity to violence).
You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.
Seon-ju reflects on her past experiences, particularly her participation in the labor union strike and the brutal way the police treated her after she participated in the Gwangju Uprising. Here, she expresses a sense of powerlessness and the inability to make a substantive difference in the world. Seon-ju acknowledges the way that some individuals (Seong-hee, for example), are indeed capable of the bravery and strength required to influence others and change the world. Seon-ju, on the other hand, opted to try to forget her past.
This quote also has a hopeful tone in that it opens the possibility that community efforts can sustain people and movements. Even if Seon-ju feels that she has no choice but to isolate herself in her personal life, she continues to work as an activist.
We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute's silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.
Years later, Seon-ju answers Dong-ho's question about why the civilian organizers used national symbols (the flag and anthem) to honor the protestors killed by military police. In a collective struggle for democracy, reclaiming national symbols holds political significance. Seon-ju thinks that singing the national anthem and giving a minute of silence over the dead was an effort to dignify them. If death and torture dehumanize the protestors, then singing over their corpses is an attempt to restore their humanity.
And that means...we are noble. Seong-hee wasn't a natural orator, and whenever she lost her train of thought or couldn't quite recall the word she'd wanted she would use that phrase as a kind of stopgap.
Here, Seon-ju recalls the phrase that the famous labor rights activist Seong-hee repeatedly used. This insistence on nobility has interesting class connotations because one meaning of the word is aristocratic. However, Seong-hee likely uses "noble" to refer to high moral or intellectual value. In other words, she counters the dehumanizing conditions that these women and girls are forced to work in at the factory. Seong-hee's lack of eloquence does not stop her public activism.
Pretending that you were too strong for me, I let you pull me along. It's sunny over there, Mum, and there's lots of flowers, too. Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming.
In her novel, Han demonstrates the full spectrum of what humans are capable of. While she fully acknowledges the brutal atrocity enacted by military and government forces, she also hones in on the dignity of regular people impacted by violence. Dong-ho lives in his mother's memories as a poetic and sensitive boy drawn to nature. Han juxtaposes this with the way that soldiers murdered Dong-ho and desecrated his memory through slander.
Soundlessly, and without a fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.
The author recounts how when she was eleven years old, she came across a photograph of a woman mutilated by the military. This was a turning point for Han. The "tender thing deep inside" her that broke could represent her loss of innocence. Like the characters in the novel, Han is unable to go back in time and be who she was prior to seeing this photograph.
