The paper compares Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl with the novels Human Acts and The Vegetarian, both by the Korean female author Han Kang. Parallels are sought in the narrative structures as both authors deal with the reality of violence exerted by political forces and systems on ordinary citizens. The difference is explored concerning the narration of the personal experience of violence and remembering. Han Kang, who was born and raised in Gwangju in 1970 and left in January 1980, could not have witnessed the tragedy of the Gwangju uprising firsthand. Yet she is known as the “Daughter of Gwangju,” who spoke about the tragedy as an adult writing independent memory literature. She recounted the horrors of the tragedy, saying that she heard the full account of the tragedy in Gwangju as a “story” and has seen it in a “photo book” her father saved two years after the incident. A literary production of such indirect experience culminated in the publication of Human Acts in 2014. Compared to The Vegetarian trilogy, published in 2007, it is difficult to find a link to Human Acts in terms of an epic context. This is because The Vegetarian lacks a realistic description of the Gwangju tragedy. The Vegetarian, however, is considered in this argument to be an epic extension of Human Acts because it uses the aftermath of visible violence that is homogeneous to the Gwangju tragedy as the motif of the novel. Additionally, it represents the clash with the “daily fascism,” which has spread like chaos through micro-violence. As she did not personally witness the violence after the uprising in Gwangju, Han Kang thus becomes an “insider in the outsiderness” and her characters are multipersonified. On the other hand, Anna Frank was a direct participant in the fatal event of the Holocaust and is an “outsider in the insiderness” who narrates her story in the first person singular. Moreover, it is argued that the Diary thus gets a new literary value because of the critique of the (relativity of) real violence. Special emphasis is put on the animalistic and vegetative nature of madness as a source of violence.
