Dreams
The novel opens with Kyungha's recurring dream, which is the novel's catalyst. As a great deal of the action takes place in Kyungha's inner consciousness, it makes sense that dreams frame the entire novel with a validation of subconscious experiences. In Kyungha's dream, she stands on a snowy plain by the sea (Chapter 1). Thousands of black tree trunks jut from the earth, resembling humans. The tide starts to come in. Kyungha worries that the water will ruin the graves there, and she desperately wishes to recover the bodies. Again and again, Kyungha suffers from the bone-chilling awareness that this dream imbues her with, though she's unsure whether the dream alludes to victims of a historical massacre or a personal omen. Regardless, the dream prompts Kyungha to propose a collaborative project with her friend Inseon, which would be part installation and part documentary.
Kyungha is not the only character who experiences revelatory dreams. When Inseon ran away as a teenager, her mother knew when Inseon got hurt because of a dream she had on the same day that Inseon was injured (Chapter 3). In Inseon's mother's dream, her five-year-old daughter sat in a field of snow. The fact that the snow landing on the child's cheek didn't melt alerted Inseon's mother to the danger her daughter was in. Here, Han shows the kind of knowledge that comes from dreams. Jeongsim's past experience of witnessing corpses lying out in the snow taught her that snow doesn't melt on the faces of the dead. Han does not attempt to explain Inseon's mother's intuition, instead giving the space in this novel for mystery.
Dreams function as doorways to knowing in We Do Not Part. They blur the line between the real and imagined, and open the question of whether that distinction matters in the first place. In Chapter 10, Kyungha says, "I feel as if I've opened the door to a dream within a dream and stepped inside," showing the nested dreamlike narratives that compose the book. However, dreams are not always presented in a positive light. Kyungha also states that "dreams are terrifying things. No—they're humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren't even aware of" (Chapter 10). In other words, the revelations that dreams provide can undo a person's self-concept.
Nature
Han includes a great deal of natural imagery in We Do Not Part even before the protagonist steps foot outside. The graves in Kyungha's recurring dream are in danger of being wiped out by an incoming tide, and this snow-lined coast corresponds to the massacres that took place on Jeju Island in the late 1940s. Humans, like nature itself, are capable of both beauty and destruction. Kyungha proposes a collaborative project with her friend Inseon in an attempt to resolve her dream and reckon with the past. Their plan is to plant tree stumps like figures and then film them, but they ultimately fail in this endeavor. The project seeks to portray nature as a bridge between different chronologies.
Jeju's landscape and natural phenomena play a central role in the novel. Kyungha travels to the island right before an intense snowstorm, which infuses the novel with elements of magical realism. Aspects of modern life that Kyungha takes for granted on the mainland cease working: businesses close, all forms of transit change schedules or cancel routes, and the water and power inside the houses turn off. Rather than isolate Kyungha completely, the snow causes her to delve into memories and speak with Inseon's apparition. Again, nature connects Kyungha to the past when she wonders whether "the snow dusting [her] hands now isn't the same snow that had gathered on" the faces of murdered Jeju residents (Chapter 5).
Memory
Memory serves as a presence, force, and archive that actively shapes the present in We Do Not Part. Much of the book takes place in the interior realms of memory and imagination (both Kyungha and Inseon's). This creates a layered narrative as Kyungha moves between past and present. As a historian, Kyungha researched and recently published a novel about a massacre in a place identified only as "G-" (which likely refers to Gwangju). To do so, she conducted intensive research about what took place. Similarly, Inseon obsessively took up the mantle of her mother's research about the massacre on Jeju Island, where they are from. Dealing with personal histories and collective memories damages both women, as evidenced by their suicidal ideation.
Kyungha's memories create myriad nested narratives as her associative thinking leads her from one time and place to another. For example, Kyungha remembers Inseon telling her during a previous visit that seeing her in front of the bean juk reminded Inseon of when her mother dreamed her presence when she ran away (Chapter 4). This leads Inseon to tell that story among many others. Doing so emulates the slightly disorienting way in which reality works: so many things occur simultaneously that individual humans cannot possibly keep track of everything. The typical impulse is to assign order and logic to things, but Kyungha rejects this impulse. Han evokes this in the image of "Hundreds upon thousands of moments [glittering] in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view" (Chapter 5). In other words, We Do Not Part allows for multiple timelines to exist simultaneously.
Fragility
Kyungha is deeply aware of and sensitive to how life teems with fragility. In the first chapter, she realizes how "the flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before [her] eyes held within them the potential to snap, to cease—so easily, and by a single decision." Kyungha herself is vulnerable to the intense pain that inexplicably grips her. Headaches, spasms, and nausea often render her unable to function unless she can stave off the symptoms with medicine. Kyungha's inability to cope with her normal life after researching about historical massacres causes a family rift, though Han does not reveal specific details about it. Regardless, Kyungha slips between the typical boundaries of past and present, life and death, and reality and imagination that govern most people's awareness. Kyungha often ponders the fragility of all things, such as when she considers "how birds sleep and die. Whether their breaths are snuffed out when what remaining light vanishes. Or whether their lives go on flowing, like electricity, into the early hours of dawn" (Chapter 5). On a sensory level, fragility resonates deeply with Kyungha, for example when she feels the delicate brushlike touch of snowflakes.
Isolation
After being unable to cope with researching about a historical massacre and discovering the violent extremes that humans are capable of, Kyungha cuts ties with her old life and holes up in an apartment just outside of Seoul. There, she isolates herself from loved ones and strangers alike, subsisting off of water, rice, and kimchi for months on end. In the first chapter, Kyungha talks about how some partings with people in her life occurred by choice while others caught her unaware. She resisted these latter ones to no avail, and Han provides no further details about what happened between Kyungha and her daughter.
Similarly, Inseon led an isolated existence in her family compound on Jeju Island following her mother's death. Caring for her ailing mother led to thoughts of suicide, and her mother's death did not alleviate these ruminations. This caused Inseon to throw herself into researching the historical atrocities that took place on Jeju Island. In their isolation, both Kyungha and Inseon attempt and fail to reckon with these historical traumas. This appears in their failure to realize their collaborative installation and documentary.
Han evokes the vulnerability of isolation in various ways. For example, Kyungha's migraines and chronic pain isolate her from those who do not experience such pain. Inseon also risked death when she accidentally severed her fingers while working alone in her workshop. It was only luck that saved her life when her neighbors decided to drop by and, upon finding her bleeding and unconscious, rushed her to the hospital. On a larger scale, Kyungha considers examples of massacres perpetrated on different islands (including Jeju and Okinawa), and says, "Sometimes I think about those numbers. And how these places are all islands. Isolated" (Chapter 5). Despite the vulnerabilities associated with isolation, Han does not dismiss isolation or cast it in a completely negative light. Instead, isolation is a natural state for certain people, beings, and phenomena in this novel.
Imagination and Speculation
Both Inseon and Kyungha rely on imagination and speculation to construct the events of the past and present. When Inseon encounters gaps in her mother's archive about what took place on Jeju, she pieces things together in her own way. This not only encompasses events but also the reasons and motivations behind them. For example, after studying a picture of recovered bones, Inseon understands that "the distinctive posture of [one] body suggested that the person was still breathing when they were buried beneath the dirt" (Chapter 9). Inseon goes on to "imagine the body was that of a woman or a teenage boy" based on the shoe size and skeletal frame. This process of imagination takes on an embodied quality when Inseon mimics the posture of the murdered person in the photograph.
Speculation and imagination lie at the bedrock of Kyungha and Inseon's friendship. Kyungha remembers traveling on a work assignment with Inseon in the early days of their friendship. They discussed local stories from the mountains they visited, and Inseon imagined possibilities for other endings and morals. Instead of a woman turning to stone as in the local legend, in Inseon's version the mountains represent the husk of an old skin.
Imagination in this novel can also be dangerous. When sharing a story about her father, Inseon says that the soldiers executed the remaining family members of those whose households contained an absent young male because they insisted that the male members must have joined the rebels (Chapter 9). This indiscriminate killing based on incomplete information and prejudice demonstrates the dangerous possibilities of imagination run amok.
Bilocation and Suspension of Belief
Facts are just one aspect of truth, and multiple kinds of truth exist in this novel. Han writes about the indisputable facts of history, but she also places equal emphasis on people's impressions, memories, and motives. These incorporate elements of magical realism into the novel. For example, Inseon's apparition tells Kyungha that she doesn't find it implausible that her father "was in prison for fifteen years and also standing right over there," or that when she assumed the posture of a murdered person she saw in a photograph, she actually "also was in the pit beneath the runway" (Part III). These instances of bilocation allow for multiple things to be true at once, and the fact that Inseon is undergoing a torturous recovery at a hospital in Seoul does not detract from the truth that she appears to Kyungha and speaks to her on Jeju.
