Jungian symbols in "We Do Not Part" by Han Kang

[Peter]

:
Here is a partial-and-tentative list of some possible symbols in We Do Not Part by Han Kang (2025 English-translation version) with some "archetypal" interpretations according to Jungian theory (i.e., Carl Jung and followers).

These are all excerpted from entries in an encyclopedia-like Jungian-archetype book I found recently -- The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, published by the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (Cologne, Germany), 2010.

I included parts of the entries that I thought were possibly relevant to We Do Not Part. Feel free to add other ideas (or other symbols)!


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SNOW

(Snow appears a lot in We Do Not Part. It is practically a recurring plot-point, almost a character itself. This is curious, given snow is not relevant to the ostensible story being told, either the story introduced at the start with the friend and the bird, or the other story. All of this could be done with few-or-no snow references. The many references of snow, and meditations on snow, must obviously mean something.)

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"In [a piece of art created ca.1850 in Japan by artist Hiroshige], the midair suspension of snowflakes suggests an almost magical suspension of time. Snow is the harbinger of winter, the season that slows down the world. Snow's ineluctable motion stills as it piles, drifts as it blocks the way where it will. [...] Covered by a layer of powdery snow, the warmed ground only partially freezes, remaining permeable to moisture and protecting the plants and animals it shelters from the effects of frigid climates. Literally 'blanketing' the earth, silent snow is often experienced as insulting the senses from the distractions of the outer wordld. The snow-covered landscape appears to be sleeping, even dreaming. In the cycle of seasons, snowy winter slumber precedes awakening in spring.

...Snow is ambiguously magical and dangerous, gentle and overpowering. It may bury everything beneath it, yet it retains an affinity with the heights, clinging to rooftops and tree branches, lingering atop mountains in every season, an image of detached purity and majestic wisdom. [...] [S]now's cool-white, reflected light often symbolizes purity and 'chaste' retreat from warm human touch. Paradoxically, snow can also reflect so much light that it ceases to illuminate, but instead blinds... [S]now can image psychic 'frozen ground' as a protectively repressed or dissociated feelings. Only in due time, perhaps, can such feelings thaw, when there is a consciousness able to withstand the melting... Snow creates simple beauty and activates fantasies of transformation."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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BIRD

(The rescue of the stranded bird is a main plot-point of the story in We Do Not Part, and we hear much of the bird in what the book turns into, even if it gets rather hazy.)

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"Birds don't seem to be bound by the same laws of nature that we are. With the very lightness of thought they defy gravity, equally at home in the air as on earth... Forming a link between heaven and earth, conscious and unconscious, the bird is almost universally seen as a symbol for the soul or anima, as the breath of the world, or the world soul hidden in matter.

In our desire for boundless freedom, we identify ourselves with the flight of birds. In our imagination we transcend the ordinary world by leaving the earth and the weight of the body...

The birds know their way, they read the signs of the seasons. They know when it is time to break up and leave for the next long journey... They follow the Sun, Moon, and stars, and when covered by clouds, the Earth's magnetic field, as they fly across continents and oceans. Deep inside us our own instincts guide us where to go. We know what is true. And we respond in turn with our own singing... We embody the spirit through song. In this dialogue of ascending and descending, listening and expressing, we may find out own soul bird guiding us on our journey."

-- [Plus, an image with this caption next to the "Bird" entry:] "The Ba, or soul bird, as the manifestation of the fullness of a person's individuality, surviving after death amd always returning to the body in the tomb. From the Book of the Dead of Tehenena, 18th dynasty (ca. 1550--1295 BC), Egypt."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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HEAD

(Kyungha's headaches? Or was that more in Human Acts? The early chapters give her a similar role)

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"In the language of images and the unconscious the head...symbolizes vital force, essence, and the immortal soul... Because the head symbolizes the immortal spirit, it is often associated with resurrection and oracular power, continuing after death..."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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FINGER (Inseon's severed fingers)

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"Fingers of flesh and blood perform the most delicate operations. They touch with remarkable sensitivity and express word and image in eloquent gestures. With extreme precision they manipulate (from the Latin word manus, hand) the concrete matter of reality, enact the executive orders of the brain and creatively shape into existence multifarious psychic forms. [As] fingers...represent the potency of the hand, [they are] related to human consciousness...

No two fingerprints are the same, making the fingers a source of positive identification and forensic tracking..."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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WOUND

(Inseon's severed fingers being the physical wound introduced early)

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"A 'wound,' from the Old English wundian, is a laceration or a breach in the physical body or psychic tissue. Wounding of every sort is a 'trauma,' the Greek word for wound, which also meant the hurt or damage of things, and heavy blows, or defeat, in war... Wound are eruptions and disruptions in what is otherwise continuous and developing. Wounds are embedded in narratives, and often change the narrative in critical and permanent ways.

Mythically, the wound as opening is also a gateway to potential transformation, and a window on encapsulated history. Freud's psychoanalytic technique relied in part on the revelations of hidden traumas. Collective wounds, like the World Wars... are intentionally kept open by memory and memorial as a means of illumination, mourning and conscious reflection...

Through psyche's wounds, new dimensions of being may similarly come to birth. Psychic process involves the healing of wounds and the causing of wounds as those 'lesions to the ego' that inevitably result with expanded self-knowledge... Indeed, wounds may be the passage into an initiatory drama or represent a numinous site where the relationship between 'self' and 'other' coagulates on new terms.

We must look into a wound, not neglect or evade it. A wound has to be evaluated, attended to, cleansed, perhaps knit together or gently probed. Wounds are subject to infection, and can fester and poison the integrity of the whole..."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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THREAD

(This one is more subtle: Chapter 2 is titled "Threads." In my version: p.36 has this line: "Was rousing such agonizing pain the only way to keep the threads of nerves intact?" and p.46 has: "The snow I had seen not even four hours earlier as I left the hospital and climbed into a taxi had resembled countless white threads finely stitching the expanse between asphalt and ashen sky.")

(quote, The Book of Symbols:)

"Threads are lines of orientation in the labyrinths of psyche and invisible conductors of light, sound, emotion, and memory.

Threads knot, evoking the interweaving of relationships and dependencies... Threads of natural fibers and even metal, wire, and plastic get twisted or braided into rope, which in religious imagery sometimes functions as a demarcation between the sacred and the profane, or as a path between them. The shimenawa, the Japanese sacred straw rope, is a traditional New Year's festival ornament for a Shinto shrine. Made in sizes from the massive to the modest, the shimenawa serves to prepare a seat for the deity that brings the New Year's blessings. Hung in an entryway or in front of a worship hall, it separates the ordinary world from the realm of the divine... [the rope is] imbued with mystical power to repel malevolent spirits and to honor the kami, the spirits of the household.

[T]he rope has always been a tool of the shaman, suggesting ecstatic ascent to the celestial regions, a means of bridging and flight and the magical road on which spirits travel."

(end quote, The Book of Symbols)

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What are others?
.

[Peter]

:
It was pointed out, at our Korean Literature Club gathering yesterday, that the very-first sentence of We Do Not Part is about snow and the very last line makes reference to a bird.

The very-first sentence: "A sparse snow was falling." It's a one-line paragraph, the first words of the book).

The very-last sentence: "Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird"!

Clearly "snow" and "bird" are important symbols in the book. Exactly what they should mean can be interpreted variously. But the ideas given in this Book of Symbols I quoted from here are a great starting-point.