Human Acts Literary Elements

Historical Fiction

The central events of the novel take place in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980. However, the book also spans other timelines and locations in Korea.

Each chapter switches perspective. Chapter 1 is told through a second-person perspective and centers on Dong-ho. Jeong-dae narrates Chapter 2 in the first-person point of view. Chapter 3 follows Eun-sook using third-person limited narration. An unnamed former prisoner narrates Chapter 4 in first person. In Chapter 5, Seon-ju tells her story using second-person point of view. Dong-ho's mother speaks in first person in Chapter 6. The final chapter (which can also be considered the epilogue) showcases the writer's perspective in the first person.

Haunting, Poetic, Recollecting, Violent

Dong-ho is the main protagonist, though the narrator of each chapter can also be considered the protagonist of that chapter. The South Korean Military Government under Chun Doo-hwan is the antagonist.

After soldiers attacked student protesters at Chonnam National University, the local populace took up arms against the military. This resistance movement became known as the Gwangju Uprising. Though the military presence was briefly driven out of the city, they returned and brutally suppressed the civilian resistance. The major conflict in the novel involves the trauma that soldiers and government officials inflicted on the characters.

Each chapter has its own highest point of tension. The climax in the first chapter occurs when Dong-ho refuses his final chance to return home with his mother and brother. In Chapter 2, the climax happens when Jeong-dae realizes that his best friend has died alongside others at the Provincial Office. The apex of tension in the third chapter occurs when Eun-sook attends the play and witnesses how the playwright outsmarted the censors. In Chapter 4, the climax occurs at the end when the unnamed former prisoner addresses Yoon and reminds him that he, too, is a human being. The climax of Chapter 5 happens when Seon-ju reveals the brutal torture inflicted on her in prison, which consisted of rape. In Chapter 6, the climax is when Dong-ho's mother recalls the fight that estranged her other two sons. In the epilogue, the climax occurs when the writer loses her childhood innocence upon coming across a photo showing a woman whose face was slashed by soldiers during the uprising.

Jeong-dae's untimely death and Dong-ho's refusal to leave the Provincial Office foreshadows Dong-ho's own death. In addition, the survivor's guilt that Dong-ho experiences foreshadows the novel's focus on this symptom of trauma.

There are several instances of natural imagery that make the scenes more vivid and also demonstrate how places change over time. For example, Han highlights the ginkgo trees growing in Gwangju in 1980, but when the writer returns to Gwangju in 2013, the trees "which had borne mute witness to it all" are gone (Epilogue).

Han Kang often discusses the paradox of human violence and dignity inextricably coexisting. She cites this riddle as the main driving force in her work.

Just as Dong-ho examines a flame and considers what happens to human souls after death in Chapter 1, so too does the writer contemplate a flame and think about souls in the novel's final passage.

Gwangju is a metonym that stands in for all brutal and suppressive human acts.

In imagining what happens after a person dies, Han personifies human souls after death.