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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Human Acts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Connection
Bodies and Vulnerability
Language, Memory, and Power
Youth, Courage, and Naivety
Afterlife and the Soul
Summary
Analysis
It’s 1980, and Dong-ho, identified only as “the boy,” is standing outside the Provincial Office of Gwangju. It looks like it’s about to rain, but the clouds have yet to break. Nearby, a young activist is talking about all the people shot and killed in protest today. Dong-ho, who has seen row after row of dead bodies brought to the Provincial Office for burial, listens closely. His middle brother has warned him to come home, telling him that the city center is not safe—but Dong-ho feels he cannot leave now, in the midst of all this violence.
From the very first moments of the story, the gruesome circumstances of the Gwangju uprising—the endless stream of bodies, the constant threat of violence—stand in contrast to Dong-ho’s youth. Even as Dong-ho takes in this horror, then, he can only process it as the middle-school “boy” he is. For example, his thoughts about rain distract him from the protest messages, and he can’t stop wondering whether he should listen to his mother’s scolding.
Themes
Earlier that morning, Dong-ho asked how many coffins they would have to arrange today. It is Dong-ho’s job to keep a record of who is in each coffin and to record which bodies have been memorialized and which have yet to receive a “group memorial service.” Yesterday, Dong-ho had to record 28 bodies. Now, he is told to expect 30 coffins.
Just as Dong-ho is swept up in the chaos of these protests, readers are dislocated, too, given little information about why these corpses are being killed or who Dong-ho is working for. But the steadily increasing number of coffins suggests that the situation is getting worse, not better.
Themes
The rest of the older students working in the Provincial Office have gone to the group funeral, but Dong-ho stays behind. From a distance, he hears the funeral-goers sing the strains of the national anthem, and he starts to sing along. The word “splendid” in the anthem makes Dong-ho think of the hollyhocks in his family’s backyard, and he closes his eyes to picture them more carefully. When he opens his eyes, the trees are blowing in the wind—but no rain has yet fallen.
Dong-ho is still pre-pubescent, but now, it becomes obvious that even the people in charge of this protest movement are not much older. Dong-ho’s longing for his family’s backyard speaks to his longing for normalcy, while the impending rain adds to the protestors’ sense of foreboding.
Themes
Dong-ho hears the funeral-goers observe a moment of silence. He, too, is silent for a minute, before he heads into the gym where the coffins are being stored. The smell makes him nauseous, even though there is a scented candle placed by every body to try and mask the odor. The most mangled bodies are covered by sheets, though occasionally people will uncover the corpses in order to identify them.
Over and over again, the characters must contend with the physical realities of death—the scents and sights of decomposition loom large, and the speed with which human lives become smelly corpses is both an unignorable fact and an important symbol of the state’s violation.
Themes
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Dong-ho is always startled, when he pulls back the cloth, by how quickly bodies compose. There is one corpse, a young woman’s body, which particularly “stuns” him: there are stab wounds all down her face and breasts, and her toes, perfectly pedicured, have swollen to triple the normal size. Dong-ho lights a new set of candles, trying his best to ignore the stink.
Though the scale of the violence has necessitated group funerals, certain details—like the precision of this girl’s pedicured toes—help preserve individuality even in the face of mass death. It is also worth noting the gendered nature of this violence, a specific threat that will recur for several of the novel’s female protestors.
Themes
Before he steps outside, Dong-ho wonders what happens to a person’s soul when their body dies: “mightn’t the person’s soul also be there by the body’s side,” he thinks, “looking down at its own face?” But then the smell comes back, and he decides there are no souls here, only “silenced corpses.”
Throughout the narrative, the idea of the soul will be a subject of much thought and debate. On the one hand, the concept of a human soul allows survivors to feel their loved ones’ presence even after they have been killed. On the other hand, the sheer brutality of the Gwangju massacre makes it difficult for Dong-ho to see anything more than the shot down, “silenced” bodies in front of him.
Themes
The first time Dong-ho came into contact with these bodies, they were still being stored in the Provincial Office, having not yet been moved to the gym. He had wandered into the Office and seen two young women there, drenched in sweat with their faces masked. Dong-ho explained that he had come to see a friend, yet when he looked at the line of unidentified bodies, Dong-ho was not able to find his loved one. The two young women suggested that the friend might still be alive, but Dong-ho was certain his friend had been killed, having heard from one of his neighbors.
Initially, this makeshift moratorium Dong-ho is working in might have seemed somewhat official to readers. Now, however, it is evident just how slapdash these efforts are. With a sudden onslaught of killing and no infrastructure to handle the dead bodies, young people like Dong-ho and these two women in masks have had to come together to fill in the bureaucratic gaps. The friend Dong-ho is talking about will later be revealed to be Jeong-dae.
Themes
One of the women, still in a school uniform, cleaned the body of a young man whose throat has been sliced with a bayonet. As she worked, she invited Dong-ho to join them, helping them deal with the crush of corpses. “From that day on,” Dong-ho reflects, “you became part of the team.”
The use of second-person narration here (“you became”) is important: it both places readers in Dong-ho’s shoes and reframes the whole story as something that is being written to Dong-ho, as if the book is a letter (or even a eulogy) rather than a novel.
Themes
The two women, Dong-ho learns, are Seon-ju and Eun-sook. Eun-sook is in her final year of high school, while Seon-ju works in a dressmaker’s shop. Both had rushed to the Provincial Office to give blood to the wounded. But when they realized how confused and understaffed the Office was, they stepped in, helping to clean, categorize, and cover the corpses.
Though Dong-ho, Eun-sook, and Seon-ju are all teenagers, they are almost instinctively committed to helping each other, forming a joint barrier against the atrocities going on outside the Provincial Office doors.
Themes
Dong-ho is only in his third year at middle school, and he is small for his age: he always sits in the front row of class, and puberty has not yet lowered his voice. Jin-su, the quiet, “almost feminine” leader of the Provincial Office volunteers, was initially surprised that a boy so young as Dong-ho would want to work here. But Dong-ho persisted, keeping a ledger of all of the bodies and helping mourning families identify their loved ones.
Again, the narration juxtaposes Dong-ho’s bravery and competence—he immediately leaps into action in this urban graveyard of sorts—with his youthful innocence. The mention of Jin-su’s femininity, which will later shape his treatment at the hands of soldiers, again foreshadows the gendered expression of so much of the soldiers’ cruelty.
Themes
Everyone splits the labor at the Provincial Office: Eun-sook and Seon-ju work to clean the bodies, Dong-ho covers them, and Jin-su creates the posters that inform the people of Gwangju who has died. The thing that confuses Dong-ho is his fellow activists’ insistence on singing the national anthem. He is also mystified by the fact that the Taegukgi, or the national flag, is placed over the coffins. Dong-ho wonders why his fellow activists sing the national anthem in mourning when the state is responsible for all this death.
In this important moment, Dong-ho struggles with what it means to be a part of a collective. On the one hand, the seamless unit he creates with Eun-sook, Seon-ju, and Jin-su feels comforting and empowering, allowing them to (literally) tend to atrocities none of them could handle on their own. But this kind of groupthink can also be dangerous, as Dong-ho sees in the images of state violence that the national anthem evokes in him.
Themes
When Dong-ho poses this question to Eun-sook, she assures him that the soldiers are only acting on orders from their superiors and that they do not truly represent the nation. But as Dong-ho listens to people sing the anthem over and over again, he cannot overcome this dissidence, nor does he feel any closer to understanding “what the nation really was.”
Even as dictator Chun Doo-hwan and his soldiers enact immeasurable pain, Eun-sook and others (like Yeong-chae in a later chapter) maintain their love for South Korea. Rather than framing protest as dissident, then, the novel suggests that activism can be intensely patriotic—that “the nation” can be made and remade by the kinds of crowds within it.
Themes
When the Provincial Office started filling up with bodies, Dong-ho tried to move some of the corpses outside. When Jin-su saw this, he immediately worried about what would happen if it rained. Jin-su then got a group of men to take the bodies in a truck, moving them from the Office into the gym. Dong-ho remembers watching the truck arrive as he played with the branches of a “still-adolescent gingko tree.”
Dong-ho’s instinct to move the corpses outside reflects both his eagerness to help and his naivety. The “still-adolescent” gingko tree, which will be cut down by the story’s end, also symbolizes Dong-ho’s own youthful state.
Themes
Soon after Jin-su transported the bodies to the gym, some grieving families began decorating each coffin with a framed picture; some also started using empty Fanta bottles as vases and candleholders. It was Dong-ho who came up with the idea of getting candles for every corpse, and Jin-su—like always—was able to immediately turn this thought into a reality.
It is important to note how practical and competent Jin-su is in the early days of the Gwangju uprising; though his time in jail will eventually leave him broken and dissolute, this first encounter with an almost impossibly in-control Jin-su makes that contrast especially stark. The fact that Dong-ho chooses candles as a way to honor and cope with death will take on great symbolic importance as the narrative progresses.
Themes
Now, they have gotten into a routine. In the morning, people bring in bodies who have passed away while being treated at the hospital. In the evening, people bring in bodies of people the soldiers have shot in the suburbs. Seon-ju and Eun-sook frequently have to stuff spilling intestines back inside stomachs, which causes Seon-ju to have nosebleeds and Eun-sook to vomit. Dong-ho still manages the ledger, silently recording the bodies. As he does so, he reflects that dead look like they have gathered for a “convention.”
The extent of the killing necessitates that Dong-ho, Eun-sook, and Seon-ju take an almost business-like approach to this horrific violence: they develop shifts and routines, replacing the traditions of a graveyard with those of a corporate “convention.” Yet even as the protestors try to mentally adjust to this death, the physical reality is so gruesome that organizers like Eun-sook and Seon-ju struggle with it on an almost cellular level.
Themes
Now, Dong-ho wonders why the rain still has yet to come. One of the protestors is listing demands: the government must release their dead, free those in prison, and acknowledge the truth about what has happened in Gwangju. The crowd that cheers these protests is getting smaller every day. Dong-ho thinks back to the first day after the soldiers withdrew, when 100,000 people gathered to sing the national anthem. But recently, there have been rumors that soldiers are going to come back, and everyone is getting increasingly fearful of leaving their homes.
Since something terrible has already happened in Gwangju, it is likely that these events are located somewhere in the middle of the 5:18 uprising. The 5:18 uprising (also known as the Gwangju massacre) denotes a series of protests against dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who had recently seized office. The protests stretched through the month of May, and each protest was met with more violence than the last, leading to hundreds of civilian deaths. The fact that the rain still has yet to come perhaps signals, then, just how much violence still lies ahead.
Themes
The protestor’s mention of bloodshed makes Dong-ho’s chest tighten. He thinks back to his grandmother’s death a few months ago. In life, his grandmother had been quiet and kind, sneaking Dong-ho pastries from her pantry. Her death was similarly quiet—“something seemed to flutter up from her face,” and then she was gone. Dong-ho finds himself wondering where this fluttering thing could have gone. He doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, or in the scary stories of ghosts he hears at school.
The question of afterlife—and particularly the question of whether people have tangible souls—will become a major one in the novel, especially as those who survive Dong-ho mourn the young boy. It is especially worth noting the language Dong-ho here uses to conceptualize what such a soul might look like. To Dong-ho, the soul is bird-like and “flutter[ing]”: it is present, delicate, and not quite tangible.
Themes
Suddenly, it starts to pour, and the cold and drenching rain makes Dong-ho think of the tears of souls. As the trees bend to the rain, Dong-ho thinks about what his life might look like if “that other world continued”—it would be time for midterms now. But last week, when Dong-ho went out to buy a study book, he instead watched as a couple, seemingly newlyweds, were murdered on their way to church. Even in the memory, Dong-ho cannot fully reconstruct how it happened. The violence feels like “too much to process.”
In the “other world” Dong-ho craves, his anxieties and preoccupations would be radically different: he could be stressed about tests rather than about senseless, seemingly random violence. Yet even as his world changes, Dong-ho’s youthful curiosity persists as he wonders about why it rains and tries to snag some extra studying time.
Themes
Eun-sook returns to the gym, pulling Dong-ho out of his reverie. She gives him a sponge cake and yogurt, explaining that the aunties at the protest were handing some food out. As Dong-ho eats, ravenous, Eun-sook tries to persuade him to return home and get some rest. Dong-ho feels self-conscious: he hasn’t showered in a while, and he knows he stinks of sweat and the stench of the corpses.
Dong-ho’s hunger for the sweet sponge cake and yogurt speaks both to his childish preferences and to the fact that he is still very much a growing boy. Dong-ho’s sudden self-consciousness about how he might smell further gets at his pubescent mindset.
Themes
Eun-sook announces that the soldiers are coming back tonight: “if you go home,” she warns, “stay there.” As Dong-ho looks at her, with her furrowed brow and her hollowed eyes, he wonders where the “fluttering” soul resides while people are still alive. Dong-ho wolfs down another yogurt.
The characters in the novel all know what physical, embodied death looks like. But the hollowness in Eun-sook’s eyes also suggests that trauma can mutate the soul (again described as “fluttering”) in more subtle ways, squashing and contorting the life force of those still living.
Themes
A while later, Seon-ju arrives, this time bringing gimbap for Dong-ho. Though he eats with gusto, when Seon-ju starts asking about Dong-ho’s dead friend, he finds that the rice gets caught in his throat. Seon-ju, who was also there on that day of sudden violence, hypothesizes that soldiers buried Dong-ho’s friend. Dong-ho studies Seon-ju’s composed face and wonders if she will stay behind in the Provincial Office to wait for death. Seon-ju says that she’s tired and then goes to take a nap.
When the rice of the gimbap gets caught in Dong-ho’s throat, it demonstrates how grief for a dead loved one can disrupt the most basic processes of life, like chewing or swallowing. Yet even as Dong-ho faces Jeong-dae’s horrible absence, he continues to feel hungry, so he must continue to eat. This conflict—between grief about those whose bodies no longer work and the omnipresent survival instinct—will become a source of frustration for many of the other characters.
Themes
Dong-ho’s mother is convinced that his friend Jeong-dae is at the hospital, not here. Dong-ho’s mother and brothers—the oldest brother at school in Seoul, the middle brother trying to pass his exams—are terrified that Dong-ho is dealing with these corpses. They are worried Dong-ho will be killed. Yesterday, they tried to persuade him to come home. But Dong-ho refuses, insisting no one will kill him for taking notes.
Dong-ho’s insistence on staying at the Office despite his parents’ warnings poses a crucial question: is Dong-ho being impossibly brave or impossibly naïve? And even though this section of the narrative stays close in Dong-ho’s perspective, even he does not seem clear about how truly cognizant he is of the risks he is taking.
Themes
The rain has stopped. Dong-ho reflects on the lie he told Eun-sook and Seon-ju—it wasn’t a neighbor who had seen Jeong-dae die. Dong-ho thinks back to that day: he and Jeong-dae are at a protest together when soldiers, hidden, start firing at protestors from the rooftops. Dong-ho takes cover, but Jeong-dae is toppled. Seeing his friend on the ground, wearing the same blue trackpants that he himself has on, Dong-ho tries to rush to him. But before he can do so, the soldiers shoot another mourner, so Dong-ho stays where he is.
The fact that Dong-ho initially lied about the circumstances of Jeong-dae’s death suggests that he feels some measure of guilt; after all, he survived this first round of shooting while his equally young friend did not. This guilt then becomes an important driving force for Dong-ho’s decision to risk his life at the Office. The image of trackpants—which is part of the middle-school boys’ gym uniforms—will come to symbolize both Dong-ho’s youth and the almost brotherly friendship he shared with Jeong-dae.
Themes
It takes 10 minutes for the shooting to stop long enough for Dong-ho and others to make their escape. While they walk, the soldiers methodically pick up and disposed of the bodies. Keeping his eyes on the ground, Dong-ho hurries home, heading straight to the terrace in the back of the house. It is all Dong-ho can do to keep himself together when Dong-ho’s father asks for a back massage.
While Dong-ho is wracked with guilt merely for witnessing his friend’s death, the soldiers actually doing the killing seem to feel no such remorse. Dong-ho’s cheerful family life makes the reality of the violence seem even more shocking.
Themes
At last, Dong-ho is able to escape to his room, where he curls up in the fetal position. Dong-ho can’t picture anything other than Jeong-dae’s face, and his trackpants in the dirt. Like Dong-ho, Jeong-dae is unusually small, so much so that his sister Jeong-mi is always trying to sneak extra milk to him. Jeong-dae hates studying, preferring to goof off. But despite his rebelliousness, Jeong-dae is loving. Once, he stole a blackboard eraser from school simply because it reminded his sister of an April Fool’s prank long ago.
First, despite his bravery in the protests, Jeong-dae is actually a very normal boy: he is physically small and filled with jokes and impractical plans. Second, Dong-ho’s commitment to remembering Jeong-dae’s life beyond the circumstances of its tragic end help preserve his friend’s life beyond the bounds of his physical existence.
Themes
Dong-ho gets up and goes to the annex of his hanok (a traditional style of Korean home), where Jeong-dae and Jeong-mi have been staying. He recalls the day before, when Jeong-dae was in a panic, trying to locate Jeong-mi. Dong-ho knows that if Jeong-mi is still alive, she will fault Dong-ho for not doing more to protect her brother. Though she is quiet, Jeong-mi is known for her stubbornness, too.
Just as Dong-ho (irrationally) blames himself for Jeong-dae’s death, Jeong-dae reacts to his panic over Jeong-mi’s disappearance by feeling guilty. The fact that both Jeong-dae and Jeong-mi have disappeared (and been killed) in such a short time again testifies to the ever-faster pace of the violence.
Themes
Jeong-mi had lived in Dong-ho’s house for a year, but the two had never had a real conversation. Jeong-mi was always getting back late from the textile factory where she worked, too tired to do anything other than ask for Dong-ho’s help starting a fire. One night, however, she had surprised Dong-ho by asking him for his old first-year textbooks. Jeong-mi admitted that she hoped to one day be able to go back to school, so she was studying for the high school entrance exam.
Jeong-mi’s life, too, exemplifies the gap between an old reality—in which the adolescent pitfalls of school and studying were all-consuming—and this new, terrifying one. Jeong-mi’s commitment to education even in the face of logistical hurdles also suggests that school and the written language of textbooks help to provide an escape from the brutality of daily life in Gwangju.
Themes
Dong-ho was skeptical that Jeong-mi could keep her studies a secret, but he lent her his book anyway. That night, and many nights to follow, Dong-ho had imagined kissing Jeong-mi and holding her tightly. In the coming mornings, Dong-ho would crawl to the door just to hear her washing her face.
Dong-ho’s crush on Jeong-mi forces readers to imagine a counternarrative—one in which Dong-ho gets to come of age normally, navigating his newfound desire for his friend’s sister rather than searching for her dead body. But what could be a classic coming-of-age story is in fact a much darker tale.
Themes
Back in the present, another truckload of bodies pulls up the gym. Jin-su is firm that the soldiers are coming back tonight—and that by 6:00 p.m., all the bereaved will need to leave in order to ensure their safety. As Jin-su goes to break the news to the grieving families, Dong-ho hears some of them arguing, vowing that they would rather die than leave their children.
Jin-su’s warning is clear: when the soldiers come back, anyone found tending to the dead is in grave danger of being killed. The fact that Dong-ho hears this warning and decides to remain by the bodies anyway suggests his amazing sense of courage (and naivety).
Themes
Privately, Dong-ho wonders if the young girl’s body in the corner could be Jeong-mi. He has no evidence for this, but he wants to be able to prove that Jeong-mi is safe. Dong-ho knows that if the roles were reversed, Jeong-mi would have gone to every hospital in order to track Jeong-dae down, just as she did every time they had a fight. Even though Jeong-mi was laughably stubborn, she was also tender. At night, Dong-ho would hear “low laughter and shared sighs” coming from the annex, as argument between the siblings gave way to warmth.
Even though Dong-ho knows that Jeong-mi is probably dead, he still feels a sense of responsibility to her. This collectivist mindset, which many of the characters share, perhaps also explains why Eun-sook, Seon-ju, and Dong-ho are willing to endanger themselves to care for strangers’ corpses—any one of these bodies could be the body of someone they love and feel they owe something to.
Themes
Back at the gym, Dong-ho is making posters of the missing when his mother arrives. In a panic, Dong-ho’s mother grabs his wrist roughly, begging him to come home. Dong-ho jerks away but promises that he will return to his house at six o’clock, when the gym closes. Dong-ho’s mother makes him promise to be home for dinner.
This dialogue is in some ways a familiar conversation for a child to have with his parent; indeed, the phrase “be home for dinner” borders on cliché. But here, the stakes of Dong-ho returning home for dinner are literally life and death.
Themes
An hour later, an old man enters the gym, struggling to walk. He explains to Dong-ho that he has come from far in the mountains, having heard that his son and granddaughter might have been killed in the recent violence. As the families pack up their supplies and prepare to evacuate, Dong-ho leads this old man through the bodies. Though he inspects each one, the old man does not recognize his relatives.
Nowhere does the narrative suggest that this man might be Jeong-mi and Jeong-dae’s grandfather—but once more, the loss of a brother and sister makes Dong-ho associate the dead strangers with his own closest friends.
Themes
Dong-ho hates this part of his job. He has nightmares about pulling back the cotton sheets to reveal decomposing faces. Sometimes, he feels as if he, too, is being stabbed by a “phantom bayonet.” When Dong-ho pulls up a sheet on a body in the corner, he can tell, without words, that this is the old man’s granddaughter. Dong-ho wonders again how long souls stay by their bodies. He thinks that, in the moment of killing, he would have run away from anyone—his mother or father or brothers. “There will be no forgiveness,” he decides. “Least of all for me.”
The image of the “phantom bayonet,” which will recur for the writer at the end of the novel, suggests that physical violence wounds not only those directly hurt but also those who bear witness to others’ injuries. Dong-ho’s feeling that there will be no “forgiveness” again speaks to his sense of collective responsibility—he feels that if he was not able to save Jeong-dae, he cannot save anyone, and therefore he himself does not deserve to be saved.
Themes
