Human Acts Study Guide

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, less than two decades after the end of the Korean War (and just 10 years before the events of the novel). Han’s father, Han Seung-won, was a celebrated novelist in the 1950s and 1960s who worked as a creative writing teacher in Gwangju before moving with his family to Seoul in late 1979. It was during Han’s high school and college years in Seoul that she started to follow in her father’s footsteps, writing poetry and her debut novel, A Love of Yeosu (1995). After achieving widespread popularity in Korea, Han rose to international fame with her novel The Vegetarian, written in 2007 and translated to English in 2016, when it won the Man Booker prize. Han, who also works as a musician, sculptor, and non-fiction essayist, currently lives and teaches writing in Seoul.

In 1979, South Korean military dictator Park Chung-hee was assassinated. A few months later, on May 17, 1980, Park’s mentee Chun Doo-hwan seized power in a military coup, declaring martial law. In the days before and after this coup, students at Chonnam National University in Gwangju staged city-wide, non-violent protests against Doo-hwan’s reign (known collectively as “the Gwangju uprising,” or the “May 18 democratic uprising”). Chun Doo-hwan’s crackdown on these protests was swift and brutal, as two army battalions arrived on planes and tanks to silence the activists. Hundreds of civilians were killed, thousands more were injured, and the very phrase “5:18 Democratic Uprising” was criminalized. Han’s novel focuses on these weeks in May 1980 when young people rose up and were massacred, but it also deals with the reverberations of the 5:18 protests throughout history. In 2013, when Han began to write Human Acts, South Korea was being forced to once again grapple with the implications of the Gwangju uprising, as Park Chung-hee’s daughter Park Geun-hye assumed the presidency (until she was impeached in 2017).

Han frequently cites modernist Korean poets Lim-Chul Woo and Yi Sang as stylistic influences. She also sees Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky as an important inspiration, perhaps because Dostoevsky, like Han, demonstrates a willingness to bring readers into his characters’ sense of grief and dislocation. Having been raised by a prominent author, however, Han finds herself consistently drawn to new plots and forms: “it isn’t easy for me to namecheck favorite writers,” she explains, “because they always change.” The structure of Human Acts, which requires multiple different narrators, narration from beyond the grave, and the use of the second-person perspective, is rooted in some important modernist and post-modernist techniques. The shift in narration is a device perhaps most frequently associated with William Faulkner (in books like As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom), while the use of the second-person perspective is a favorite narrative technique of Italian writer Italo Calvino.