Reality versus Dreams

We Do Not Part explores the instability of reality in the face of great tragedy.

At the beginning of the novel, Kyungha begins to lose her grasp on reality when she is “researching the book [she goes] on to write” (10). She starts to dream about the atrocities she is researching, and soon the nightmares become so unbearable that she cannot sleep at all. In turn, Kyungha begins to hallucinate. “When someone who hasn’t slept soundly in a while,” she remarks in Part I, Chapter 1, “who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves” (12).

The more hallucinations inspired by the Jeju massacre that Kyungha experiences, the more she starts to question what she is really experiencing and what she is imagining. “Am I actually seeing this,” she wonders, and...