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Negation of Violence and the Disappearance of the Future: Rereading Han Kang’s 1990s Novel The Black Deer (1998)

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2026, 83(1), pp.511~558
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : January 22, 2026
  • Accepted : February 14, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

Seo Yoon Choi 1

1광주과학기술원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies, through a close reading of the text’s internal logic, the gap between the narrative ending of Han Kang’s early novel Black Deer (1998) and the novel’s thematic core condensed in its central image, the “black deer.” In doing so, it seeks to locate in Black Deer a singular point that cannot be reduced to either the grand narrative of “history” or a narrative of “individual authenticity.” It is worth noting that the interpretive framework centered on the keyword “orphan consciousness” — presented in Kim Byeong-ik’s criticism in the 1990s, among the earliest responses to Han Kang’s fiction — has remained largely unrevised in subsequent scholarship on Black Deer. Kim’s discussion, however, overlooks that the violence of the coal industry is represented not through the miner Im Yeong-seok, but is displaced onto his daughter, Im Ui-seon. Accordingly, this paper reads Black Deer as a text that registers the violence of the coal-mining industry. The novel’s setting, the fictional Hwanggok City, is a devastated and abandoned mining town in the wake of coal-industry rationalization policies. The landscape of Hwanggok is depicted not through the miners themselves but through Jang Jong-wook, who photographed miners underground. Kim In-young, who interviews Jang Jong-wook, anchors the narrative present; yet the figure who propels the future toward which the fiction gestures is Im Ui-seon. Living as a workingclass woman on the urban margins, Ui-seon attempts, through writing, to discover a truth that might cohere her life, but she fails to complete her writing. This failure culminates in an episode on a spring afternoon when Ui-seon runs naked through the streets and suffers a mental breakdown. The novel ends by staging the (im)possibility of her recovery from an illness rooted in the violence of the mining industry and refracted through her mother’s own mental collapse — an ending that leaves its vision of the future blank while intensifying the characters’ endless movement. By foregrounding what is distinctive in Han Kang’s early fiction through close textual analysis, this paper demonstrates a reappraisal of her literary-historical significance as a novelist of the 1990s.

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