Summary
The narrator describes being tortured in prison with a pen jammed between his fingers. The prison guards and interrogators also severely beat the prisoners, made them share a minimal amount of food and water, and forced them to sit in inhumane conditions or else face further torture.
The narrator felt relieved when he was partnered to share meals with Kim Jin-su because the latter's deadened appearance gave the impression that he would not eat much. In the present day, the narrator sees Jin-su's obituary and wonders what caused him to die before the narrator. A professor doing research for his dissertation asks the narrator questions about Jin-su.
The narrator and Jin-su were among those who stayed at the Provincial Office when the army reentered the city of Gwangju in 1980. After Jin-su helped evacuate the remaining women in the building, he surprised the narrator by returning to the office. Dong-ho also came in and refused to leave.
The narrator had mixed feelings about their endeavor; he half believed he would survive until dawn, when they hoped that other citizens would gather and protest by the fountain. As they waited for the army to come, Jin-su decided they would have to surrender if they wanted to survive. While the narrator refuses to recount exactly what happened when the army arrived at the Provincial Office, he does describe the blood that flowed down the stairs after the soldiers shot many of the narrator's companions.
Two years after his release, the narrator runs into Jin-su at a restaurant. They share the various lingering effects of their torture, including pain and insomnia. Over the years, they meet up a few times until Jin-su's death by suicide.
Analysis
Told from the perspective of a prisoner who remains unnamed, Chapter 4 describes in great detail how imprisonment and torture strip a person of their humanity. The original Korean title of this chapter translates to "Iron and Blood." The narrator remembers physical sensations like thirst as "savage" and "animalistic," driving impulses that one would never have outside of such horrific circumstances. A professor drags the narrator's trauma to the surface while attempting to get the narrator to divulge his experiences from prison. Using the second-person pronoun "you," the narrator directly addresses the professor. "You" is no longer Dong-ho (as this pronoun was in previous chapters).
In the narrator's memories of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, he recalls constantly hearing people sing "Arirang," the national anthem. The struggle uniting Gwangju citizens against the army also creates a sense of nationalism despite the fact that they face state opposition. This shows that nationalism is a subjective concept.
The narrator talks about how the main purpose of torture was to reduce him and the other prisoners to "nothing but filthy stinking bodies." Throughout the novel, Han depicts humanity as something that resides in the relationship between body and soul, so torture is an affront to everything that makes a person human. Later in this chapter, Jin-su struggles to find something adequate to compare the human soul to. He settles on glass, a transparent and fragile material. According to Jin-su, their experience of being broken and "shattered" in prison proves their humanity. In other words, humanity is inherently fragile.
Trauma and survivor's guilt haunt both the narrator and Jin-su. The professor who attempts to glean information from the narrator informs him that Jin-su's body was found next to a photo showing the bodies of schoolboys massacred by the army. In response, the narrator repeats that those boys followed his and Jin-su's orders, implying their culpability. Time passes but does not heal this trauma. On the contrary, the narrator describes feeling alone with these memories and knowing that he is "not a safe person."
