Inseon's Potential Phantom Pain (Symbol)
Inseon faces the choice of enduring intense weeks-long pain as her carers poke her fingertips, or amputating them and living with phantom pain. This potential phantom pain symbolizes Kyungha's psychological suffering as a result of writing about massacres. Others may dismiss or invalidate this pain due to its invisible nature. The missing limb represents the past, appearing as a phantom even in the present. If Kyungha does nothing to attempt to reconcile with the past, then it will continue causing her to suffer.
Birds (Motif)
Birds appear throughout the novel as characters, vestiges of the past, spirits, and symbols. Their meaning changes depending on how they appear. The first section is called "Bird" because Inseon's request that Kyungha depart immediately to Jeju Island to save Ama serves as the novel's catalyst. Inseon's care for Ama clearly tethers her to her life and insulates her from the pain of total isolation. In Chapter 4 ("Birds"), Kyungha evokes the resiliency of birds by describing how "feathered dinosaurs, or birds, were one organism that managed to survive the devastation [of an asteroid collision] by flying for months on end." Kyungha expresses a fascination with how light Inseon's birds are, crediting their hollow bones.
At the end of the novel, Kyungha strikes a match that she compares to "the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird," an image that echoes the end of her novel Human Acts and evokes the human spirit.
Camellias (Symbol)
In Part III, Inseon hands Kyungha a camellia bud. Kyungha describes how the "the tight bulb of rice-colored petals was dusted with snow that glimmered like sugar granules in the light." The camellia holds special significance in relation to the Jeju Massacre, including "representing the victims, forgiveness, reconciliation, and co-prosperity" (Yon and Kim). In 1992, an artist named Kang Yobae painted "The Camellia Has Fallen," which depicts the camellia as a symbol for the massacred. That Inseon hands Kyungha a camellia bud that has not yet blossomed represents hope.
The Woman Who Turned to Stone (Allegory)
In the early days of their friendship, Kyungha and Inseon visit three mountains where the local residents share a story. In the legend, one woman is the only village resident to offer an old traveler a bowl of food. In exchange, the traveler tells the woman to leave the mountain before daybreak the next morning without telling anyone where she is going and without looking back. The woman follows the first part of the instructions, only to turn around and look when a flood submerges the village. As a result, the woman turns to stone.
One underlying message in this story is to help others in need. Another could be not to look back on the past. Both Inseon and Kyungha lead isolated existences partly as a result of not being able to cope with historical traumas. In this way, they have calcified like the stone woman in the story. However, Inseon interprets a new meaning in the original, which is that the stone is actually skin that the woman shed and left behind. This revisionist storytelling grants new possibilities to the act of looking backwards and bearing witness to destruction.
Candles (Symbol)
Candles appear throughout the novel as a source of light and a way to honor the dead. In her Nobel Lecture, Han describes Part III in the following way: Kyungha and Inseon "light a candle at the bottom of the sea" after having traveled down "to one of humanity’s darkest nights." They take turns holding the candle, showing their roles as co-protagonists. In the novel's very last image, Kyungha lights a match to dispel the darkness, and the flame takes on multiple meanings as "a blooming heart," "a pulsing flower bud," and "the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird."
