Summary
Part III is entitled "Flame." Inseon asks Kyungha whether she perceived a change in temperature. Rather than answer verbally, Kyungha places her hand over the photo of the bones, and she characterizes these remains as "what remained human even now." Kyungha wonders if they have reached the "very bottom of the deep sea where nothing emits light."
Inseon asks for the candle to guide her path to the door, and Kyungha follows her through the dark house. Something faintly luminous stands out to Kyungha, but in the absence of light, she does not stop to investigate. Inseon moves and speaks quietly as though trying not to disturb someone.
Inseon invites Kyungha to go out and see where they will install the tree stumps. Kyungha reluctantly agrees, worried that the candlelight will go out. They pass the candle back and forth, which solidifies Kyungha's sense of sisterhood with her friend. Kyungha follows Inseon outside and steps only where she stepped. They pass through the dark woods. In her disoriented state, Kyungha wishes to return to the house, but Inseon forges onward. Eventually, Kyungha stops worrying that the candle will go out.
They arrive at the designated place with a third of the candle remaining. Inseon hands Kyungha something that turns out to be a camellia bud. They sit in the snow with no desire to head back, and Inseon tells Kyungha about caring for her deteriorating mother. Jeongsim mistook her daughter for various people, including her sisters. After her mother died, Inseon obsessively took up Jeongsim's research on the massacre. She experienced euphoria upon feeling the presence of those killed. It was then that Inseon decided to work on the project that Kyungha initially conceived of.
Kyungha sits in the snow and waits, deciding that she does not want to hear her friend keep speaking about historical massacres. The silence resembles cotton wool. Inseon tells Kyungha that she thought about Kyungha so often and so intensely that it was almost as though she could conjure Kyungha's presence. This allowed Inseon to understand her mother's stories about people being in two places at once. For example, Inseon's father was simultaneously on Jeju and in prison, and when Inseon ran away, Jeongsim saw her daughter in the kitchen.
Kyungha repeatedly wonders if Inseon is truly with her or if she herself is the apparition. Various questions of this nature flood Kyungha's thoughts. She asks how she could feel the cold so intensely if she were actually dead. Though the friends know they shouldn't fall asleep out in the snow, they decide to rest their eyes for a bit. Kyungha notices how the candlelight causes the snow crystals to resemble kernels of fire.
When the candle goes out, Kyungha feels around in her pocket and lights a match. The first few fizzle out. Kyungha asserts that if Inseon disappears in the darkness, it means that she woke up in the hospital in Seoul. Kyungha finally manages to strike a match. In the final image of the novel, the little flame resembles a blooming heart, a pulsing flower bud, and the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.
Analysis
Kyungha again consents to something she does not feel comfortable with when she follows Inseon out into the snow to see the place where they plan to install the tree stumps. As earlier, when Kyungha resisted looking at photographs of the deceased, here she is reluctant to venture out into the snow with just a little candlelight left for the purpose of seeing the site of their planned project. However, in both cases, she follows Inseon's lead. Both women are emotionally damaged due to historical traumas, and they reach out to each other while navigating their dark and confusing experiences. This is conveyed in a motif of Inseon reaching out her hand for Kyungha to give her a candle, which emits a guiding light.
It is clear that a transgenerational transmission of trauma occurred between Inseon and her mother. Despite the familiar and sisterly love that Inseon's mother showed her daughter, the teenage Inseon grew to resent and hate her mother. In earlier chapters, she recounts running away. In Part III, Inseon shares that as her mother's mental state deteriorated with dementia, she often mistook her daughter for her murdered baby sister. After returning to Jeju to care for her ailing mother, Inseon took up her mother's research about what took place on the island. It became difficult for her to differentiate herself from her mother. Inseon compares their relationship at that time to "a pot of juk bubbling overnight, splattering, overflowing, nearly burning" (Part III). Scholar and professor Marianne Hirsch writes about the concept of "postmemory," which involves the ways in which the children of deeply traumatized people connect to the past "not by recall by imaginative investment, projection, and creation." This can be seen when Inseon began to remember her mother's memories as though they were her own. In other words, the past continues to live in the present.
Inseon further conveys the permeable boundary between herself and her mother when she remembers how hard it became to separate her mother's body from her own. According to Inseon, her mother's "thin skin, the scant muscles underneath, the lukewarm heat of her body, and her disorientation all mingled with mine as one indistinct mass." In this way, disorientation becomes the dominant experience for them both. Inseon goes on to say that she had suicidal ideations as a result. Picking up where her mother left off in researching the massacres became her lifeline once her mother died. However, studying the incarcerations, torture, murder, and other atrocities that took place also took its toll on Inseon. Witnessing the violence that humans are capable of scarred Inseon's heart.
Han discusses the United States' complicity in the massacre when she writes, "the governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that's what it took to stop their communization." This demonstrates the violent extent of the anti-communist efforts as well as the way the US meddled in Korean affairs. To this day, many feel a strong sense of resentment toward the US. Kor Hee-bum, chairman of the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, has stated that “the US government’s apology regarding the role of the US military government and the US military advisory group has been delayed” (Letman).
The last chapter of this novel (as well as throughout the entire novel) allows for multiple things to be true at once. These physical paradoxes include bilocation, even if one location is inhabited by an apparition. For example, Inseon's father "was in prison for fifteen years and also standing right over there," and Inseon herself hugged her knees to her chest and was simultaneously "in the pit beneath the runway." Inseon's own presence on Jeju opens the possibility of hallucinatory magical realism as she introduces multiple chronologies and nested narratives. Han does not attempt to resolve any of the storylines, instead ending the novel with an ambiguous image of a flame.
