50 pages • 1-hour read
We Do Not Part
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Tree Trunks in Kyungha’s Dream
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The tree trunks in Kyungha’s dream represent the thousands of Korean citizens who were buried in mass graves during the massacres that Kang explores in this novel. Kyungha herself identifies the trees as symbolic stand-ins for bodies and reflects that she began having this dream after beginning her research into the G—— massacre, a fictionalized version of the Gwangju massacre, which Kang herself wrote about in her novel Human Acts.
The fact that the trees in Kyungha’s dream are only half buried and thus still readily identifiable speaks to Korean state efforts to conceal the killings: Despite official denial and obfuscation, the atrocities were always public knowledge. Although many Korean citizens participated in governmental denial, out of fear of retribution or fear of confronting the truth, the state-sponsored violence at Jeju, Gwangju, and other sites was never entirely suppressed.
As such, the tree trunks help the author explore Historical Memory and Collective Trauma. The way that this dream haunts Kyungha, impacting her sleep and emotional well-being, is meant to reflect the profound impact that the only partially “buried” truth of Korean political violence has on Korean individuals, families, and society. It is additionally important that, in her dream, Kyungha wants to re-bury the bodies and worries that those set into sand close to the shoreline are in danger of being washed away by the current. At one point in the novel, Kang notes that many victims of mass killings on Jeju were in fact washed away by the current, so this detail has important historical significance. However, on a symbolic level, the danger that these tree trunk “bodies” will be washed away speaks, again, to the state’s efforts to seal records of its massacres and prevent public knowledge of mass killings. Kyungha’s anxiety is a fear of not being able to bring attention to these massacres before all knowledge of them disappears.
The One Curled-Up Body in the Mass Grave
At one point during their conversation, Inseon describes a photograph to Kyungha. The photograph, taken of a partially exhumed mass grave, depicts a jumble of bodies. One body, however, is curled up and lying on its side in a distinctly different position that Inseon argues people take when they are feeling unwell or trying to self-soothe. This body, she theorizes, was thrown into the grave while still alive.
Inseon became fixated on this one body, and for her, it came to symbolize the lost identity and humanity of Korea’s many victims. She thought about this person all the time, attempted to figure out their name and life story, and even began to lie down in a curled-up position in her room. Her interest in this body symbolizes the entire motivation behind Inseon’s current project: to restore lost identity and humanity to victims of mass killings. She does not want to merely raise awareness for Korean state atrocities but to ensure that “faceless” victims will have their identities re-entered into the historical record. Each of these people was, like Inseon’s disappeared relatives, someone’s cherished parent, child, or partner, and the symbolism of the curled-up body develops the theme of Friendship and Human Connection from a different perspective.
Snow
The snow symbolizes the suppression of the massacres’ histories, both the Korean state’s efforts to censor historical records and societal complicity in denying or being silent about the atrocities. Snow first appears in the opening scene of the novel, in Kyungha’s dream, the dreamy landscape in which Kyungha has visions of half-buried tree trunks that she is sure symbolize bodies, only partially concealed in mass graves. Snow begins to fall as Kyungha starts to make her way to Inseon’s home on Jeju, and it makes her journey to Inseon’s increasingly difficult. Snow quite literally covers the roadways and paths that Kyungha must traverse to find Inseon’s house in the darkness, and Kyungha struggles to identify landmarks that would be visible in better weather. Because Kyungha’s journey in this novel is ultimately one of discovery, the snow that impedes her physical journey also symbolizes the obstacles on her journey to learn more about Korea’s violent past to process her grief.
The snow that blankets Kyungha’s dream scene is also a symbolic representation of the way that the Korean government concealed records of both its mass killings and the graves where victims were buried. Kyungha alludes to this history of obfuscation obliquely during the early portions of the narrative, but the novel’s final chapters clarify that the Korean government, in addition to officially covering up its crimes, forbid survivors to discuss the Jeju massacre and others, on pain of punishment. Kyungha and Inseon’s research is meant to draw attention to these atrocities, and the author’s symbolic usage of snow becomes another way in which she engages with the themes of Historical Memory and Collective Trauma and Grief and Loss.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events