Lee’s self-discovery leads him through the Korean War and a post-war coup from which he emerges as a brilliant military strategist. The novels form a continuing exploration of the riddle of young Lee, introducing him as a lieutenant, fresh from his instructorship in Western civilization at the national university. I have to learn to live that, too.” The explanation of Major Lee’s riddle of self-definition begins in Kim’s first novel, a finalist in the 1964 National Book Awards. At the conclusion of the second novel, The Innocent, Major Lee, a Korean Hamlet and Kim’s hero, responds to the army chaplain when the latter asks him how he can bear to leave his country shortly after a military coup: “There is a riddle, Chaplain, a great riddle that Colonel Min has left behind me. The task of self-definition consumes both of Kim’s novels, but it produces no easy solutions. Kim is now an English professor and novelist he lives in the United States. His grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, was executed by the Communists during the Korean War. Like Lieutenant Park, one of the characters in his first novel, The Martyred, Richard E.
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