We Do Not Part

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

We Do Not Part is ultimately an interrogation of Korea’s history of state-sponsored violence and a meditation on the impact that mass killings have had on the Korean public consciousness. The novel’s deliberately confusing narrative structure and its personalization of the mass killings through Inseon’s family history establish the effect of trauma on memory, while the factual details about the Jeju and Bodo League massacres engage with and bring attention to fraught chapters in Korean history that lay hidden for decades. With these strategies, Kang emphasizes the effects of both trauma and systematic repression on historical memory.

Kang immediately establishes the ambiguity and blurred boundaries of reality in the novel with Kyungha’s opening dream sequence. Even Kyungha, upon waking, identifies it as a symbolic representation of one of Korea’s many mass graves. This sequence establishes the importance of mass killings to the narrative and its thematic project, and the fact that the novel begins with a dream rather than factual, historical details is important. For many decades, public knowledge of massacres like those at Gwangju and Jeju was severely limited by the government, and open discussion of the killings was a punishable offense.