The Orphan Master's Son

One year after Jun Do’s arrival at the prison camp, a nameless interrogator is questioning a subversive professor when he receives news that Commander Ga has been apprehended and is in custody. Excitement flows through the building; Commander Ga is an important person, praised for his conquests, including his marriage to Sun Moon. However, it is rumored that the person they have captured is only an imposter and not the real Ga.

There are two groups of interrogators within Division 42, the old-school Pubyok, who are fond of breaking hands and using torture to get prisoners to confess, and the group to which the narrator belongs, who prefer to use “sharp minds” as their “interrogation tools” (180). His group puts together a biography of the prisoner’s life, from his earliest memories to his greatest achievements because “when you have a subject’s biography, there is nothing between the citizen and the state” (181). The interrogator presents the professor with his biography, and although it looks like things will go well for the professor, he is then hooked up to the “autopilot”, a torture device which dispenses electrical current in increasing doses. The effect of the electricity will be to separate—figuratively speaking—the professor from his brain.