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Chapter 3: The Editor, 1985
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
A university professor is interviewing an unnamed narrator. The narrator recalls being tortured with a black Monami Biro, an otherwise ordinary pen that became an instrument of tremendous pain. Over and over again, the interrogator would jam the pen into the narrator’s left hand, leaving his right hand undamaged so he could write his confession. By the end of the torture, the narrator’s left hand was a pulp of “raw meat.”
In Eun-sook’s chapter, pens and ink were symbolic instruments of violence. But here, Chun Doo-hwan’s repressive state itself makes that symbolism literal, as the fancy pen mutilates the narrator’s hand. It is also important to note whom this narrator is speaking to: for the first time, the novel’s words are being directed not to Dong-ho but to this mysterious professor.
Themes
When the narrator was first arrested, none of the prisoners dared to ask where they were or even to speak. Each interrogation began with some physical torture, confirming to the narrator “that my life had been taken out of my own hands, and the only thing I was permitted to do now was to experience pain.” The interrogators would ask questions calmly, but the answers the prisoners gave them were never sufficient. And when the interrogators sent the narrator back to his cell, they made him sit completely straight against the wall as guards shouted at him and the other prisoners, denying them food and water. The men weren’t even allowed to fall asleep.
Though the narrator is speaking in 1990, he seems to reflect on torture that took place some time ago. Poignantly, just as Jeong-dae felt that his body was holding him back, the narrator now feels that the sensory “experience” of bodily pain has nullified his “life”—his inner thoughts and feelings and dreams. In other words, by forcing him to be aware of his bodily vulnerability, the state torturers have made the narrator lose his sense of interior self.
Themes
Three times a day, the guards fed the prisoners. The narrator was paired with Kim Jin-su, who ate little. As they shared their small portions, the narrator felt Kim Jin-su’s eyes follow him, devoid of life. Now, Jin-su has recently died, having taken his own life. As the narrator speaks with the professor, he wonders why he was able to survive while Jin-su was not.
Now, the narrator’s place in the story becomes clear: this is the same Jin-su who supervised Dong-ho, and the narrator seems to have been arrested for his own participation in the Gwangju uprising. The narrator’s guilt about his survival mimics Eun-sook’s, as does his complicated relationship with his own natural metabolic processes and cravings for food.
Themes
The narrator becomes frustrated, wondering why the professor would want to dredge up all his most painful memories with this interview. Besides, Jin-su’s experiences were not identical to the narrator’s. Because of Jin-su’s somewhat feminine features, he was subjected to whole other forms of torture, as when the guards would unleash ants to nibble on his genitals.
Like Eun-sook, the narrator wants to forget the worst of the violence—even though it seems that the trauma he endured has seared every detail of that violence into his brain. The fact that Jin-su received extra harsh treatment because of his “feminine” traits once more suggests that the violence under Chun was often gendered, enacting the regime’s regressive vision of male dominance.
Themes
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In 1980, during the uprising, Jin-su was still only a freshman in college. The narrator did not know Jin-su well, so he was surprised when Jin-su decided to stay behind that night the soldiers came back into town. The narrator recalls that night: together, he and Jin-su make wills, preparing for death. Even after Jin-su is ordered to escort the women home, he comes back, ready to face the army as bravely as he could.
Jin-su’s clarity of conscience, decency to others, and sense of bravery is clear in nearly every anecdote about him—at least before the state’s brutal torture. Though the narrator and Jin-su were not personally close, the bonds of a shared cause nevertheless made them ready to die together.
Themes
But as the army approaches, Jin-su suddenly finds himself overcome with tiredness. He lays down, and soon the rest of the protestors join him, as if Jin-su’s sleepiness is contagious. At one point in his nap, the narrator wakes to see Dong-ho crawling in beside him. Jin-su is scolding Dong-ho, telling him to go home. When Dong-ho refuses, Jin-su only make him promise that when the soldiers come, he will surrender right away.
This strange sleepiness could be read in many ways: as young people’s lack of awareness about the situation they would soon face, as a kind of preparing for death and afterlife, or even simply as exhaustion with the state’s endless brutality. It is crucial to note that Jin-su does not want Dong-ho to be there, risking his life in this way—and that, hoping to protect Dong-ho’s life, Jin-su gives him the specific directions on how to surrender that will later lead to Dong-ho’s death.
Themes
The narrator was 22 at the time, one of the oldest members of the resistance. Even though the narrator knew rationally that the army wildly outnumbered them, he could not help feeling the force of “conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.” Similarly, even as a spokesman for the student militia told journalists that everyone was prepared to die, most of the students themselves felt more hope that they would survive than fear that they would be killed.
The narrator’s relative maturity perhaps explains why he can give such a balanced, straightforward recounting (unlike Dong-ho and Jeong-dae’s more piecemeal, emotionally driven stories). But even at 22, the narrator was still unable to entirely accept his situation, feeling hope instead of a much more realistic awareness of the danger he was in.
Themes
When the narrator first started protesting, he was amazed by the sense of strength and unity he found in crowds, singing the national anthem as if he could feel “the sublime enormity of a single heart.” But when the bullets and tanks came, that unity was shattered. As the narrator faced the fallout the next day, the lines outside the hospital and the looted guns, he wanted only to regain his feeling in the crowd—“the miracle of stepping outside the shell of our own selves.”
The narrator likely has not read Eun-sook’s book about crowd psychology, but here, he describes what it feels like to live such a phenomenon. In the crowd of protestors at Gwangju, the narrator was able to give and gain strength from everyone around him, feeling almost as if their blood was coursing through his own veins—as if they shared “a single heart.” And in a way that felt almost “mirac[ulous],” the narrator was able to leave behind the fragile “shell” of his individual selfhood (with its cowardice and caution) to find something more “sublime” and powerful in the crowd.
Themes
The narrator and Jin-su were old enough to make this decision for themselves, but Dong-ho was not. He was more concerned with sponge cake than with this grave choice. The narrator doesn’t know exactly what happened when the soldiers arrived. He only knows that no one in the resistance fired their guns (because they did not know how to) and that Jin-su made Dong-ho promise to “look for a way to live.”
Dong-ho may have been insistent with his mother that he wanted to stay at the Provincial Office, but the narrator is now the second character to affirm that Dong-ho was not ready to die. And even though Jin-su encourages Dong-ho to protect himself, Dong-ho could not—the logistics and stakes of the situation would be almost impossible to understand as a young boy.
Themes
Later, the narrator found out that the army had been given 800,000 bullets—enough to shoot every person in Gwangju twice. The narrator knows that the people in the student militia who were killed that night spared many more others from a similar fate. Those who were not killed were jailed, punished according to whether they were found holding guns.
The scale of Chun Doo-hwan’s violence is now revealed to be even larger than previous characters have understood. The narrator’s insistence that the student militia’s resistance saved others, while it might be true to some extent, also reflects his anxiety that all of the losses did not mean anything.
Themes
Those who were not holding guns were released in batches. But those whom the soldiers had found holding guns experienced even more extreme forms of torture: “hairpin torture” and a horrific procedure known as the “roast chicken.” Looking back, the narrator begins to realize the purpose of such tactics—the army was trying to make these men feel ridiculous, as if their resistance was only ever a joke. The narrator thinks back to his hungry, horrible days in prison.
The logic behind the narrator’s desire to bring meaning to his co-protestors’ deaths now becomes clear: he is trying to counteract the state’s torture, which reduces everyone to their painful, embodied instincts. Only by continually dwelling on the causes he and his co-protestors fought for can people like the narrator salvage themselves from the state’s violence.
Themes
The youngest prisoner, a quiet, brave boy with a stutter, is named Kim Yeong-chae. Every so often, Jin-su talks to Yeong-Chae; he tells Yeong-Chae he does not need to use honorifics with him, as they are around the same age and come from the same region. As the narrator gets to know Yeong-Chae, he learns that the boy lost his cousin in a protest. But though Yeong-Chae tells the story of his cousin’s death with dry eyes, when Jin-su asks his favorite foods—sponge cake and Sprite—he bursts into tears. Yeong-Chae is being tortured, too.
Yeong-chae should immediately remind readers of Dong-ho: both are young, quiet boys, and both swerve between steely bravery and childlike yearnings for sweet treats. Yeong-chae’s breakdown at the mention of sponge cake is particularly poignant—such simple pleasures now feel so alien in this world of torture and starvation. Like Dong-ho, Yeong-chae was not old enough to know exactly what he was choosing—namely, a life that could never hold small pleasures again—when he stood in those crowds of protestors.
Themes
In the present, the narrator tells the professor that every time he sweats in summer, he remembers how he felt in this era of torture: that he was no more than sticky flesh and pus. In those times, as his shoulders or toes were forced apart, the narrator would do anything to end the pain; he remembers shouting “for God’s sake stop, I did wrong.”
In the crowd at the Provincial Office, the narrator felt principled. But since the interrogations, the narrator is too aware of his own fragility—of the sweat and pus inside of him—to care about those principles or about anything other than ending the torturers’ escalating pain.
Themes
A few months later, the narrator recalls, the soldiers convened a makeshift court. Thirty men were sentenced at a time, as guards forced them to bow their heads and patrolled the seats of the courtroom with their guns. The prisoners were told that if they spoke or even lifted their heads, they would be immediately killed in their seats. But on the day of the narrator’s group trial, Yeong-Chae began to sing the national anthem. The rest of the men soon joined in, singing softly but clearly. To everyone’s surprise, the soldiers let their prisoners finish the song.
Yeong-chae’s decision to sing the national anthem reflects both the unique bravery of youth and his belief, widely shared in the novel, that protesting is patriotic. After months of torturing individual prisoners, this show of unity perhaps intimidates the soldiers.
Themes
The narrator explains that he was given a nine-year sentence, and Jin-su was given seven years. But these sentences didn’t really mean anything: the men were released in batches, as if even the soldiers knew the charges were absurd. Two years after being released, the narrator sees Jin-su again. But though time has passed, neither man has been able to accomplish anything—not go back to school, move out, or even date. The memory of the interrogation room is still too fresh.
Though little was known about the narrator’s life before his torture, readers have seen time and again that Jin-su used to be a highly competent person. But the torture has left its mark, and though Jin-su and the narrator are no longer in physical pain, the emotional wounds block them from ever forging normal lives (a seemingly common phenomenon for survivors of the Gwangju uprising).
Themes
In the present, both men have become reliant on alcohol to get any rest, so they split a bottle of soju until neither of them are really conscious. Then, this becomes a ritual: for years, Jin-su and the narrator meet to lament their loneliness and inability to work, as they swap alcohol or painkillers and try their best to forget. Neither man can even fathom the idea of taking revenge—they are too exhausted. Every so often, Jin-su laughs at the fact that they thought guns—which none of them had ever fired—could protect them.
Memories of life before and after violence can provide comfort, but—as was true for Eun-sook and Jeong-dae as well—violence is something at once necessary and impossible to forget. Jin-su’s comment that none of the protestors could actually fire their guns again points to these young peoples’ innocence and to their utter naivety about what they might have to face.
Themes
In 1989, the narrator finally starts working as a taxi driver. One rainy night, Jin-su approaches the narrator after his taxi shift. Jin-su looks even more devastated than usual, and as the narrator welcomes Jin-su into his apartment, he feels real fear. Finally, Jin-su explains that there was a trial, and Yeong-chae has been sentenced to life in a psychiatric hospital. Apparently, Yeong-Chae tried to kill someone after trying to kill himself six times. The narrator can’t bear to hear this story, so he pours himself a glass of soju, excuses himself, and goes to bed.
Time moves much faster in this section than in other chapters, giving readers a sense of the blurry, monotonous way that the narrator and Jin-su experience life. Jin-su’s deep pain at Yeong-chae’s hospitalization, even years after they knew each other, once more reflects the lifelong connections that this month of activism in 1980 created. And losing Yeong-chae, whom he met in his youth, likely reminds Jin-su of Dong-ho’s death.
Themes
As he told this story, Jin-su wondered aloud what a soul was, desperate to know what Yeong-chae lost when the torturers abused him. “It was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls,” Jin-su reflected. After the torture, “what we really were was humans made of glass.”
In this vital passage, Jin-su echoes the idea that humans really do have souls. But while Jeong-dae explores how souls can persist even after death, Jin-su seems aware that souls can vanish even in life if someone experiences significant trauma. And when the strength of a soul vanishes, all that is left is a vulnerable, physical body, fragile as though “made of glass.”
Themes
Shortly after that visit, the narrator reads about Jin-su’s death in the newspaper. There are not enough coffin-bearers at Jin-su’s funeral, so the narrator volunteers, though he leaves before the service is over. The narrator never read Jin-su’s suicide note, nor did he look at the photo that accompanied the note, which showed several young children dead in a straight line. Now, in the story’s present, the narrator is livid that the professor is asking him about these things, even if it is for the purpose of his scholarly, “psychological autopsy.”
The fact that Jin-su leaves a photo of murdered children with his suicide note directly links his death to the 5:18 massacre—indicating that the violence of the past is hurting for victims long after 1980. The phrase “psychological autopsy” will reverberate for other characters, as the professor expands his interviews to as many survivors as he can reach.
Themes
On that day in Gwangju, the narrator and Jin-su lay with their faces down while the soldiers taunted them (“I was in Vietnam, you sons of bitches”). Eventually, five of the youngest members of the resistance came down, including Dong-ho. None of these boys had any weapons, and they all walked out in a straight line with their arms up. In the present, the narrator tells the professor that the kids were lying in a straight line because they were shot in a straight line—“with both arms in the air, just like we’d told them to.”
For the soldiers, this kind of violence is almost a game— some of them have even gone from war to war, finding power and pleasure in repeated group brutality. More importantly, this revelation shows why Jin-su blames himself so directly for Dong-ho’s death—he told Dong-ho to stand in a school-like formation, emphasizing his youth, and Dong-ho wound up dead in that very line.
Themes
The narrator reflects that “some memories never heal.” Instead, these rare memories are so painful that everything else fades away. The narrator wonders if “the experience of cruelty” is the only thing every human being shares: the idea that “each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat.” Once, a soldier in Busan revealed to the narrator that the army incentivized extra brutality with cash prizes.
The narrator has long known that human beings can be reduced to “raw” flesh, their bodies in so much pain that they begin to feel like nothing but “a lump of meat.” But here, he reflects that just as anyone can become the sum of their fragile body parts, anyone can also be like that soldier, pushed by the swirl of the crowd toward acts of unimaginable “cruelty.”
Themes
Indeed, the narrator believes that many of the soldiers who came to Gwangju were remembering moments in the Korean or Vietnam wars where violence was met with a “handsome reward.” The narrator feels that every member of the human race is capable of such cruelty—including people like himself and the professor. Every day, the narrator looks at the scar on his hand from the pen. “So tell me professor,” the narrator asks, “what answers do you have for me? You, a human being just like me.”
The narrator’s utter distrust of the world is painfully evident here. After all, why should he trust the professor’s commitment to telling his story with written words when the state’s terrifying pen still scars his hands? And how can he rely on “a human being” like the professor—or even more terrifyingly, himself—when he has seen how powerless or brutal all humans can become? All it takes is torture, being interrogated, or even just standing in a crowd for humans to step outside of themselves.
Themes
