I often think, after watching a film by a top director, that a work is known by its first frame; the strikingness of the initial image that captures the senses is reflected far-reachingly and is deeply remembered. All other scenes, until the end of the story, if the work is worthy, remain connected, harmonious and justify the great, all-pervading beginning. Whether the first frame is the embodiment of inspiration, the whisper of the muse or the product of long-term reflection, awareness, the desire to thematize the world and its associated phenomena, or the motivation to actualize the problems that weigh on man - the author himself knows best, and only a devoted and sensitive audience can guess. The same applies to the first sentence of a masterful writer's novel. Whatever it was poured out of, whatever its motive may be: if the outpouring is violent, shrill, sincere, naked, heartfelt - it is unforgettable. A novel with a powerful, promising beginning is not to be let out of your hands. Its continuation and ending rhyme equally. Han kang is a writer of such a strain. The lines before you are a modest review of three of her novels from which, from the first sentences, the untamable force of oblivion bursts forth. And perhaps, above all, the force of the body which, quite philosophically, calls upon the reader to reach and encompass the meaning and bearing of that (perishable) human characteristic. That finality, inevitability, fate, but whose givenness and potentialities must not be denied or ignored. That is why it is given a voice. Finally, Han Kang's novels cannot be (read) without the reader's body being deeply affected and changed. Displaced. Re-examined.
The disturbing silence
Can the body be reshaped, can a different fate be assigned to the body through thought and decision? Novel Vegetarian, which made Han Kang famous, despite the title suggesting that it is about the rejection or renunciation of meat consumption, represents a kind of, somewhat radical philosophical meditation on the body, violence and the limits of freedom. At the center of this work is the transformation of the main character, who, by rejecting food of animal origin (which manifests itself in a condensed dream), begins a process of self-annihilation, but also self-affirmation. At first, her choice seems like an act of disgust, perhaps even ethical hypersensitivity, but as the plot progresses, the impression emerges that it is a fundamental existential resistance. She stops eating meat, but beneath that surface, something quietly separates her from the world. All the tissues of her being resist the language by which they had been named until then. The hands no longer belong to work, the mouth no longer belong to speech, the body does not belong to others. The body slowly returns to something original, slower, inclined to non-violence. By refusing to participate in the chain of violence, the protagonist rejects the very structure of society, which is based on hierarchy, control, and discipline of the body. Her body engages in a struggle between social norms and an inner need for liberation. In Foucault's terms, the mechanisms of power are inscribed in the body. The heroine's refusal to eat is not just a personal choice, but a subversive act by which she evades these mechanisms. However, her rebellion is not articulated in intimate language or political discourse: it is subtle, almost ineffable, which makes her terrifying to those around her. In her desire to change the fate of her own body, i.e., in her aspiration to become a plant, the heroine quietly raises the question of identity and the limits of the human. She strives for a state of complete nonviolence: an existence that does not harm or consume others. She dreams of leaves and light that ask for nothing in return, she dreams of roots that do not devour but spread almost imperceptibly in the darkness. In these dreams, there is no blood, screams, or death: only an existence that does not breathe and does not survive at the expense of others. It raises an unspoken question, seemingly imbued with Schopenhauerian pessimism: the world is a stage of continuous suffering and struggle, and therefore, if every action is also an act of violence, then the only way out is to stop acting, to stop wanting, to stop being. But therein lies the tragic core of the novel. Vegetarian: society cannot accept such a form of freedom. It reacts with violence - physical, psychological and symbolic - trying to return the body to the limits of "normality". The heroine, who wants to free herself from violence, becomes its victim. In doing so, Han Kang reveals a profound irony: the attempt to escape violence often ends up intensifying it. The body is a "thing" that others want to tame: they observe it, shape it, punish it, interpret it - but they do not understand it. For how can one understand the decision to disappear from an order that constantly reaffirms man as an object? How can one grasp the desire to be a plant - not from the need to escape, but from the desire to never hurt or be hurt again? The structure of the novel, told from the perspective of other characters, further emphasizes this alienation. The protagonist has almost no voice of her own; she exists as a mystery, an enigma, a void that others try to fill with their projections. Her silence is not just a lack of speech, but a radical refusal to participate in a language that is already compromised by violence. The environment does not know what to do with such silence. She disturbs him more than any scream. Her passivity becomes a threat, because she refuses to participate. And that's why the body, which wanted to become a forest, is returned to the limits of the flesh - by force, looks, insulting words. Vegetarian leaves readers with disturbing questions: is it possible to live completely nonviolently in a world that is inherently cruel? And if not, what is the point of trying? What if we were, like a plant, immobile but alive, vulnerable but without the urge to hurt? And would such a world even consider us human? There is no consolation: we are faced with the limits of our own morality, immersed in a philosophical space of relentless experience of discomfort.
Encounters on the edge of language
The temptations that befall a person regarding the body are incalculable and painful, but at the same time revealing and liberating, forming a completely new relationship towards oneself and the world, horizons that can only be grasped by a being who has lost the powers of sight, hearing or speech. Han Kang in the novel Ancient Greek lessons presents a philosophical-literary story about language, loss and the limits of human communication. The heroes of this work, a woman who gradually loses her ability to speak and a professor of ancient Greek whose eyesight betrays her, bear witness to the essence of expression on their shoulders, trying to overcome the gap between speech and silence. A woman's speech does not betray her suddenly and dramatically, but almost imperceptibly: words waver and scatter between thoughts and breath, leaving behind an emptiness, a disintegration. It is as if the world no longer has a name, and without a name - how can it be kept? Han Kang presents readers with a kind of paradox, embodied in the heroine's decision to turn to ancient Greek, a language that no one speaks anymore, while her own language eludes her due to the impossibility of speech. In this way, she suggests that communication is much more than a means of mere exchange of information: it is an ontological topos of human self-affirmation. The loss of language is not only a physical and psychological problem, although the body reacts violently to it, but a burst of existential questioning and breakdown, in which the subject loses ground under his feet and is deprived of access to the world. A glorious claim Martin Heidegger that “language is the house of being” is reversed here: the heroine, through silence and fragmentation, begins to glimpse a different form of presence - less rational, but more authentic. Now silence is the house of being, and language is the vulnerability and resilience of the body. The character of the professor, who teaches Ancient Greek despite its “uselessness”, further deepens this idea. His dedication to a dead language can be interpreted as an act of defiance against contemporary utilitarianism: the value of language lies not only in its functionality, but in its ability to (trans)carry traces of past worlds, meanings and feelings. Ancient Greek in the novel is a symbol of duration, of transcendence. It is necessary to survive in the cracks of time, and the ever-temporal language is the only guarantee of this. In several places in the novel Ancient Greek lessons refers to ancient philosophical authorities and layered concepts that are the very source and core of thought and knowledge. The protagonists of the novel meet at the edge of language: their closeness grows from a common loss, not from understanding. They resemble two lines that do not intersect, but move side by side, in the same direction of disappearance. They establish a connection in a space of uncertainty, proving that true communication does not depend on clarity but on the willingness to share silence and uncertainty. They do this bodily, gently, without words, most often with long and unwavering glances, pauses that are teeming with meaning, as if they want to return communication to its beginning, to its earliest form - before language, structure, before logos, before the mandate (of) clarity. The body is a meta-medium: while modern language slips away, the subtle and elusive behind every lost meaning opens up a (new) possibility of sensation. Finally, the novel Ancient Greek lessons asks a philosophical question: if we lose language, do we lose ourselves, or is it only then that we have a chance to find ourselves again? Han Kang is reluctant to give a definitive answer, although she suggests that words may never have been the only way we existed for each other. The deepest understanding takes place precisely where language stops: in the gaze, in the presence, in the connecting silence. In the power of the body.
That under the snow
The novel is equally pregnant with philosophical reflections. We are not parting., inspired by historical tragedy, but also by the themes of memory, trauma and the impossibility of a final separation between the living and the dead, emphasized by the question: how to live with what constantly returns? Starting from real events related to the rebellion on the island of Jeju, Han Kang explores collective memory, gathered in the imperative of an ever-open past. What is violently repressed does not disappear: on the contrary, it persists as a ghostly presence that shapes the present. It is as if the author haunts the thoughts Jacques Derride about the “ghosts” of history: the past is not behind us, but haunts us, demanding to be acknowledged and told. The relationship between the characters in the novel, especially through the act of witnessing and listening, raises the question of the ethics of memory. What does it mean to bear someone else's pain? Is it possible to bear witness without appropriating? In this context, the philosophy of Emanuela Levinasa, for whom the relationship to the Other is always an ethical responsibility. In Han Kang's poetic and personal world, memory goes beyond a personal act: memory is a moral obligation towards those who can no longer speak. In this novel too, the body acquires a special space and expression. It manifests itself, among other things, in the symbolism of snow whose whiteness is lost under the burden of unspoken names, voices trapped between breath and earth. Snow covers traces, silences sounds, but at the same time preserves what is beneath it. It is a metaphor for oblivion that is never complete, because buried it still exists, ready to emerge in the cracks of silence. In the novel We are not parting. people do not leave. They dissolve into the landscape, becoming part of the wind, salt, snow. Their absence is a density that is felt in the chest, like a frantic but unbreathable breath. It is as if every encounter carries within itself all previous and future partings. The dead are not completely absent; they continue to exist through the memories and bodies of the living, through the very structure of the world. Not parting is an ontological category. Death is not finality: existence is always intertwined with what is lost. Therefore, in this novel, Han Kang insists on presence, staying with pain, memory, with others. Because perhaps we never truly part: neither from those we have lost, nor from the history that continues to shape us. We always carry each other in our bodies, as a burden, a wound, and light. Snow does not fall to erase traces, but to sober up and startle. The novel We are not parting. It is like snow: it falls before we have even begun and wished to (read), without asking whether we are ready. And when we embark on the feat of the inexorable force of language-body, we must move carefully, because the snow bends both the path and the abyss. Every step is an abysmal memory.
Violence as a structure of existence
The aforementioned novels by Han Kang are connected by a recognizable network of motifs that transform, deepen, and illuminate each other. Her prose is not cyclical in a plot sense, but it is thematic: the same fundamental unrest appears again, each time in a different form. One of the most noticeable common motifs is the body, which is never neutral; it is exposed to violence, but also capable of resistance. In Vegetarians refuses to participate in the chain of consumption and becomes subversive; in Ancient Greek lessons loses his voice, revealing his fragility and dependence on language; in We are not parting. is the bearer of memory - it remembers even when consciousness tries to forget. In all the above variations, the body is both a limit and a possibility: a place where the rifts between the individual and the world are most directly felt. Another key motif is violence as a structure of existence. Han Kang does not depict violence spectacularly; it is often silent, systemic, almost invisible. In family relationships, social norms or historical events, violence is a phenomenon that permeates everyday life. In We are not parting. violence has a historical dimension, linked to the rebellion on the island of Djedja, while in Vegetarians intimate and familial, but equally devastating. In all depictions, there is a striking sense that violence is not the exception, but the rule that shapes human relationships. A third obvious motif is silence as an alternative form of expression. Han Kang's characters often lose their voice or consciously reject it. In Ancient Greek lessons Silence arises from the impossibility of speech; in Vegetarians from the refusal to participate in an already compromised language; in We are not parting. The author is pushed beyond the limits of language itself when faced with trauma. Silence in Han Kang's work is, however, saturated with a meaning stronger than words. Closely related to this is the motif of language as an unstable, unreliable medium. Language in her novels does not guarantee understanding; on the contrary, it often makes it impossible. In Ancient Greek lessons the paradox of a dead language raises the question of what it really means to communicate. In other works, fragmented narrative and multiple perspectives show how truth disintegrates through attempts to be told. Language is both necessary and insufficient: a tool we cannot do without, but it constantly fails us. The motif of transformation, on the border between the real and the symbolic, is also crucial. In Vegetarians the transformation is towards the plant, or giving up on the human; in We are not parting. the boundary between the living and the dead becomes porous; in Ancient Greek lessons transformation takes place through the loss of language and identity. These changes are ambivalent, simultaneously opening and devastating. Memory and trauma form another thematic pillar. In Han Kang, the past is never closed. It survives in fragments, the body, the landscape. In We are not parting. se collective trauma becomes almost tangible, while in Vegetarians takes on a more intimate form, but retains the same destructive power. Memory is persistent, although on the edge between presence and disappearance. Nature is another important motif, but not as a romantic backdrop. It is mostly contrasted with the human world, as a topos of a different way of being. Plants in Vegetarians represent the ideal of a non-violent life, while the snow in We are not parting. it simultaneously hides and preserves memories. However, nature in Han Kang's works should not be understood as a comfortable refuge and a unique sanctuary, without ambiguity: it is merely the possibility of a different, difficult-to-reach existence for man.
Ultimately, Han Kang's oeuvre is a rambling meditation on borderline situations. The characters in her novels sometimes firmly, sometimes fragilely, fight with oppositions: language-silence, body-spirit, life-death, violence-nonviolence, light-darkness, and her literature, always imbued with philosophy, is born and persists in this intermediate zone, showering us with questions and insisting on one of the key human tasks: confronting the body, history, others, and (in)finitely, the self.
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