We Do Not Part Literary Elements

Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction

The novel begins in Seoul, South Korea, but largely takes place on Jeju Island, where the protagonist examines the impact of historical traumas. The book also takes place in interior settings such as memory (both individual and collective) and imagination.

Kyungha is a historian and writer who narrates the novel in the first person. However, the novel can be said to encompass multiple points of view. For example, Inseon's apparition shares her family history, and Kyungha and Inseon piece together accounts based on archives, interviews, speculation, and personal knowledge.

The tone can be described as haunting, poetic, and ethereal as Kyungha grapples with historical atrocities and the felt presence of the dead in Jeju's snow-covered landscape. The reader is left with a sense of the fragility of human life and the importance of narratives (both individual and collective).

In her Nobel Lecture, Han Kang states that while Kyungha and Inseon pull the novel forward, the true protagonist is Inseon's mother, Jeongsim. The reason for this is because she survived the Jeju Massacre, "fought to recover even a fragment of her loved one’s bones [to] hold a proper burial," "refuses to stop mourning," "bears pain and stands against oblivion," and "does not bid farewell."

The major conflict is the ongoing trauma of historical acts of human brutality. The characters in the novel struggle to reckon with the past, specifically the Jeju Massacre.

The climax occurs at the end of Part I in Chapter 6 as Kyungha finally makes it to Inseon's house on Jeju Island only to find Ama (Inseon's pet bird) dead. After burying Ama, Kyungha falls into a feverish sleep, believing she will die.

Because the novel does not follow a linear timeline, Han relies less on foreshadowing future events than on creating resonances between the past and present. For example, when Kyungha recalls the early days of her friendship with Inseon, she remembers going on assignment to a mountainous region. There, they heard local stories about a woman who turned to stone upon witnessing the destruction of her village. This connects to the ways in which both Kyungha and Inseon isolated themselves after not being able to cope with historical traumas. However, Inseon also engages in revisionist storytelling when she suggests the possibility that the remaining stone woman is just a husk or skin that she shed. This opens the potential for hope and freedom in the present while still honoring the past, which can also be seen in the symbolic images of a camellia bud and a candle.

Although Han does not shy away from squarely describing the horrific facts of history, she fluctuates between a stark and ethereal or dreamlike tone. For example, the poetic passages about snow create an understated feel.

Kyungha alludes to the Gwangju Uprising in the first chapter.

The novel is abundant with natural imagery that not only grounds the setting on Jeju, but also cycles through different themes based on the elements. For example, the brutality of which humans are capable is conveyed through the fires of the scorched-earth policy that burned homes and killed residents (Chapter 5). However, the flame of Kyungha and Inseon's candle also honors the dead. Like fire, water takes on multiple meanings. It has both a soothing and destructive presence that moves between the boundaries of the past and present. In Kyungha's dream, the ocean tides threaten to demolish graves, therefore erasing memories (just as the ocean tides carried away the bodies of the deceased). However, water also reminds Kyungha of her connection to the past when she wonders if the same snow dusting her hands also gathered on the faces of the dead (Chapter 5).

Staying alive is itself a paradox for Kyungha. She asks how others endure life's bleak cruelty "without a fire raging in one's chest" or "a you to return to and embrace" (Chapter 5).

Bilocation opens paradoxical possibilities in the novel. When Inseon ran away as a teenager, her mother found her sitting in the kitchen one night despite the fact that she was in Seoul at the time. Inseon does not find it implausible that her father "was in prison for fifteen years and also standing right over there," that hugging her knees to her chest under her desk" made her "also in the pit beneath the runway," or that contemplating Kyungha's dream caused her to "see shadows glimmering like fins inside a lightless aquarium" (Part III).

The dream of Kyungha's that opens the novel parallels how perpetrators of the Jeju Massacre killed residents on the beach so that the tide would carry away all evidence.

Kyungha's unwilling estrangement from her daughter resembles the way that Inseon ran away as a teenager after being unable to bear what she considered to be her mother's weakness.

The president of the Jeju bereaved families' association shared a story about a young survivor from the massacre who went door to door asking for clean clothes to change into. Only the residents of the third house he stopped at took the risk of helping him (Chapter 12). This parallels the story that Inseon and Kyungha heard in the early days of their friendship where a village woman helps a stranger who, in turn, warns her to leave the village and not look back.

The novel's final image of a lit match resembling the "wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird" parallels the final image in Han's novel Human Acts.

Kyungha's recurring dream personifies trees as "a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow" (Chapter 1).

Kyungha mistakes a palm tree with waving fronds for a person in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 11, Kyungha detects a presence emanating from an old newspaper as though the voices of massacred Jeju residents speak through the text and photographs.