How Does We Do Not Part End And What Does It Mean?

I look at ending on ambiguity in novels and I am usually very critical. ‘We Do Not Part’ offers plenty to pick apart, not least the literal sequence of events which runs as follows: Kyungha reaches the isolated home of Inseon, finds the body of Ama, suffers a collapse of senses and time in the ensuing blackout, and is left to witness Inseon’s disappearance from the house. This leaves us to question whether or not our narrator has died or whether he is experiencing a particularly vivid fever dream. The ambiguity is well-documented in terms of plot summary and close reading. But what does it mean? The ending of ‘We Do Not Part’ functions as a clever device which further reinforces the two major themes of the novel: the difficulties of carrying a trauma of collective proportions and the inherent fragility of witness. Ultimately, the ending of the novel suggests that the line between memory and invention is highly porous and that narrative strives to repair erasure but can only reproduce absence. According to many reviews and academic studies, the latent presence of the Jeju massacre is woven throughout the novel such that the conclusion reaches a point where some histories cannot be retrieved in neat fashion and that storytelling of an ethical nature may well have to struggle with uncertainty. The disappearance of Inseon from the house is not some spooky flourish; rather it functions as an affirmation of the novel’s exploration of history.

The end of ‘We Do Not Part’ by Bandi left me gasping for air, wondering in which world I had left the book. The story jumps from one scene to another as if connecting dots between past and present. The last scenes of all are unfolded when Inseon’s house is blanketed in a severe blizzard. It is the day when Kyungha arrives at Inseon’s house to find Ama the bird dead in her room. After that Kyungha is lost between reality and dreams. The boiler in Inseon’s house breaks down. The cold air bites harder and scenes are turned and connected like attaching new pieces of a jigsaw puzzle until Inseon disappears from the story. It is left to Kyungha to guess whether Inseon must have frozen to death somewhere, drowned in a dry river bed, or had returned to her fevered delirium. This ending does not feel like a cliffhanger but an unresolved and painful issue that has been left to the reader to work out. The themes of personal guilt and collective trauma, especially the unsolved and hidden truth of the Jeju massacre, are joined with the deeper issue of remembering and relating violence in this ending. Inseon’s disappearance can be seen as a moral problem to be solved by the reader. Can our stories fully hold the dead or do they turn into ghosts? Bandi’s use of dreams, and the use of fragments of the past through archives and other sources, has been noted by other critics. It is the way that these are used to insist that memory is stubbornly and GetNameely refused to be tidied up, that this is what makes the novel so powerful to read. The ending is an invitation to the reader to consider these issues of who gets to tell stories of loss and how a writer can reopen old wounds whilst at the same time showing that silence can be used as a protection or as erasure. It is a cold, precise and compassionate ending to a deeply powerful book that has left me to sit with it for some time.

All I can think about is the last page of ‘We Do Not Part’… Kyungha’s tires screeching as she goes up to the island, the dead bird, the blackout, and then Inseon’s disappearance. It’s so ambiguous that I’ve seen many summaries and reviews of the book mention how deliberate the ambiguity is. But to me, the ending is so emotionally resonant because it dramatizes how trauma and memory can disappear and be forgotten if someone doesn’t tell the story. Inseon’s disappearance especially is not a plot hole but a statement about how history can be lost when a witness dies. It’s such a cold and aching ending that it will linger with me like frost on skin.

It’s hard to sum up the ending of We Do Not Part because it feels like nothing really landed. Kyungha deals with the after effects of Inseon’s injuries and the death of Ama the bird, then everything starts to fade into a haze of hallucination as the village disappears in a storm. And Inseon disappears too. The reader is left wondering whether everything that has just happened was real or just another part of Kyungha’s dying visions of solitude. Many summaries and reviews of the book deal with this ending. It’s hard to deal with in itself because the disappearance of Inseon can be read in so many ways, not least as a metaphor for how so many traumatic histories are allowed to fade from memory unless someone actively remembers them. The book returns again and again to the stories of the Jeju massacre and to the business of remembering them. The ending leaves us to wonder whether we can ever hold history within language, or whether language is naturally dissolving. I found it both unsettling and refreshingly honest, refusing to offer any kind of consolation.