No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir: The Korean War in Lark and Termite and The Coldest Night

Abstract

Two recent novels on the Korea War, Lark and Termite and The Coldest Night, focus on two particularly disturbing incidents of the Korean War: the No Gun Ri massacre and the battle of the Changjin Reservoir. The novels explore the ways in which these ugly episodes of the war revise the official memory of the Cold War and resonate with the lives of those within the U.S. After excavating and examining the relevance of the Korean War, they simulate the older paradigm of returning to domesticity, reflecting not only the cultural and political tendency of the 1950s but also that of the public responses to the 9/11. This paper intends to read the significance of the treatment of the two novels on the Korean War as well as the limits therein to understand the implications of the shifts in the American public memory of the War.