Human Acts Themes

Human Acts, Han Kang’s 2014 novel about the 1980 Gwangju uprising, is filled with scenes depicting crowds. Some depict protestors chanting and singing in unison, refusing to bend to the tyranny of then-president Chun Doo-hwan, In others, crowds of soldiers rush to fire their guns, encouraging one another to kill more innocents. Elsewhere, the novel depicts crowds of corpses piled together for group funerals. In each case, the narrative suggests that individual people…

Han Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts, which follows a group of protestors in the years after the 1980 Gwangju uprising, is full of descriptions of bodies in distress. Dong-ho, the novel’s murdered protagonist, spends his middle-school years cleaning and categorizing corpses, noting how death swells toes and whitens faces. Seon-ju, who spends her life moving from activist group to the next, can comprehend complex labor and environmental issues—but she can never wrap…

Many of the characters in Human Acts, Han Kang’s 2014 book about the 1980 Gwangju protests, become activists—and lose their lives for doing so—while still children. On the one hand, the novel emphasizes the bravery that boys like Dong-ho and Jeong-dae, not yet in high school, possess. But on the other hand, Han’s prose consistently demonstrates just how undeveloped these boys really were. When Dong-ho is killed, he is wearing his school gym uniform…

Many times in Han Kang’s novel Human Acts, survivors and victims of the 1980 Gwangju uprising contemplate what happens after death. Some disillusioned characters, like an unnamed narrator who spends years being tortured in prison, believe that humans are only “filthy, stinking bodies,” existing in the flesh or not at all. But other characters disagree. At the very beginning of the story, young protagonist Dong-ho recalls seeing his grandmother die: “something seemed to flutter…