The Martyred by Richard E. Kim

First published: 1964

Type of plot: War

Time of work: June, 1950-May, 1951

Locale: Korea

Principal Characters:

• Captain Lee, an intelligence officer in the army of the Republic of Korea (ROK) who is assigned to investigate the execution of twelve Christian ministers
• The Reverend Mr. Shin, a forty-seven-year-old Christian minister suspected of betraying his twelve colleagues to save his life
• Captain Indoe Park, the best friend of Captain Lee and the son of one of the executed ministers
• Colonel Chang, the chief of ROK Army Political Intelligence
• The Reverend Mr. Hann, a twenty-eight-year-old Christian minister who, with Mr. Shin, was spared execution
• Chaplain Koh, a Christian minister in the army
• Major Minn, a doctor in the army
• Major Jung, a Communist army officer and the executioner of the ministers

The Novel

The title of The Martyred refers to twelve North Korean Christian ministers who are shot to death by Korean Communists early in the first year of the Korean War. Intelligence officers of the South Korean forces seek to establish, for propaganda purposes, that the ministers died as true martyrs in defiance of their captors’ attempts to win their allegiance to Communism. The narrative develops two movements in counterpoint; one is physical and historical, the other psychological and spiritual.

The historical movement is the first year of the Korean War. The North Korean Communist regime had sought to bring all of Korea into the Communist sphere. South Korea resisted the military and political takeover, and its capital, Seoul, was captured. The South Korean and United Nations troops drove the invaders back and captured the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, which is the scene of most of the action in The Martyred. A dreary and dispiriting winter of occupation is followed by the evacuation of Pyongyang and a retreat before the new advance of Communist forces.

As the physical situation of territorial command deteriorates, the spiritual situation of faith versus unbelief simultaneously moves toward resolution. The focus of the spiritual matter is the Communists’ execution of twelve Christian ministers and their sparing of the lives of two others. Captain Lee, the narrator of the story, is assigned by Colonel Chang to interrogate the survivors, Mr. Shin and Mr. Hann, to ascertain that the twelve died as true martyrs, presumably betrayed by Shin and Hann.

The question of faith and unbelief arises from the uncertainty about the manner of the ministers’ deaths. Captain Lee has learned that one of the ministers was the father of his good friend Captain Indoe Park, whose hope is that his father had died in a failure of faith. In life, the Reverend Mr. Park had been an exemplar of the truly faithful and had sought to constrain his son within a doctrine of spiritual correctness. The son rebelled, however, and the father disowned him. Lee’s investigation discloses that the father had in fact lost his capacity for prayer. Captain Park’s reaction leads to his own discovery that he himself is, and has always been, a believer. Throughout, Captain Lee, an atheist, remains firm in his unbelief.

Major Jung, a captured Communist officer who had presided over the execution, makes it clear before he is shot that all twelve had died in a betrayal of their faith, begging for their lives. The young Hann had been spared because he had lost his reason, while Shin, having spat in the major’s face, had been spared because he alone of the fourteen had shown courage.

Shin insistently pretends that the twelve had died as courageous martyrs. Although he himself, as it turns out, has been unable to attain faith, he treasures the Christian faith and wants the populace, inspired by the martyred, to grow stronger in faith. His motives coincide with those of Colonel Chang, who wants the populace, enraged by the executions, to intensify their hatred of the Communist enemy. At a memorial service held for the slain ministers, Shin, the nonbeliever, delivers a eulogy that lifts the crowd to new heights of belief. Colonel Chang, despite his contempt for the “martyred” and his personal conviction that Shin had betrayed them, is delighted. Captain Lee, who has favored honest exposition of the truth, whatever it might entail, respects Chang and Shin for their actions but not for their motives. Ironically, both Lee and Chang are baptized Christians who hold no Christian belief and abhor Christianity.

Subsequent to the climactic evacuation of Pyongyang, Colonel Chang goes underground and is eventually killed in a raid that he engineers and in which he voluntarily takes part; Captain Lee is wounded in action and is hospitalized; and Captain Park, dying of wounds heroically received in combat, is, at Lee’s request, given Christian burial. Shin, captured after refusing to leave Pyongyang, is reported to have been publicly executed, but accounts of his continued activity translate him into a legend.

The novel concludes with Chaplain Koh’s Christian church service. Lee does not join in the prayers, but after leaving the church, he joins a group of refugees humming a song of homage to their homeland and feels “a wondrous lightness of heart.”

The Characters

Captain Lee is the author’s persona. Like Lee, Richard E. Kim, dislodged from academic life when the Communists entered Seoul, became an officer in the army of the Republic of Korea. Lee’s observations of war and civilian suffering reflect Kim’s personal experiences.

Lee is drawn in the text as one committed to truth but tolerant of religious beliefs that he cannot share. He is sustained in his conduct by his growing realization of a profound love that comprises friendship, devotion to homeland, a deep sense of duty, and compassion.

Mr. Shin is the novel’s focal character. He is a minister whose faith is not in the God of his preaching but in the faith itself of the people to whom he preaches. His faith in the reality and efficacy of faith, as opposed to faith in the reality and solicitude of God, has various parallels in modern literature: These include Søren Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation; Albert Camus’s Tarrou in La Peste (1947) The Plague, 1948) Pär Lagerkvist’s Tobias in The Pilgrim, who, like Lagerkvist himself, is en troende utan tro (a person of faith without faith); and, especially, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo’s Saint Manuel, a Christian priest who nurtures in his parishioners the faith that he does not himself have.

Colonel Chang, a fashioner of propaganda, wants the people to be strengthened in their faith, but only in the interest of political unity. Lee’s attitude toward Chang is initially one of dislike and distrust, but he comes to understand and appreciate Chang’s human side and is, at last, not surprised to learn of Chang’s heroic death in action beyond the call of duty.

Captain Indoe Park is representative of the believer, or the person of faith, whose opposition to the trappings of organized religion, as embodied in his affectedly righteous clergyman father, imbues in him the conviction that he does not have faith. The conviction is shattered when his father’s hypocrisy is exposed; Park then makes his father’s faith his own.

Chaplain Koh is a Christian whose faith, not being tested or challenged, is not made his own. A man of no faith with faith, he is the reverse of Shin, a man of faith without faith. It is significant that he abandons his military uniform and works with civilians as one of them.

Major Jung is the enemy officer. His role in the novel is to expose the executed ministers as cowards and to recognize Hann’s lapse from sanity and Shin’s remarkable courage. Jung himself, villainy aside, displays the same kind of courage toward his executioner, Colonel Chang, that Shin had shown when Jung was the executioner.

Critical Context

The Martyred, Kim’s first novel, was followed by The Innocent (1968), a sequel of sorts, which continues the activities of Lee, Koh, and others and which opens with the end of the Korean War in 1953. In subsequently published works, he extended his investigation into the psychological fabric of his homeland. Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood in Japanese-Occupied Korea (1970) offers, in novelistic fashion, his perspective of his country from his second through his thirteenth year, during the period from 1933 through 1945. Concurrent with his return to Korea from 1983 through 1985 as a Fulbright Scholar at Seoul National University, he wrote a book with the Proustian title In Search of Lost Years (1985).

The Martyred encapsulates the texture and mood of all of Kim’s writing, namely, metaphysical self-discovery derivative from deep personal loss, expressed in a style imitative of the simplicity of Camus and Lagerkvist. The Martyred initiates a body of work that reflects not only the two worlds of spiritual faith and secular faith but also the two worlds of a Korean national writing in English as an American citizen.

Bibliography

Freund, John B. “Martyrs, Pilgrims, and the Memory of Camus.” The Minnesota Review 4 (Spring, 1964): 483-485. Freund compares The Martyred to two other works published in 1964, translations of a novel by Lagerkvist and a play by Rolf Hochhuth. The Martyred is rated well below the other works and is described as an inelegant imitation of Albert Camus.

Galloway, David D. “The Love Stance: Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred.” Critique 24 (Winter, 1964-1965): 163-171. An essay on the Camusian concept of the absurd is followed by a critical estimate of The Martyred as creatively evocative of Albert Camus’s fiction. Galloway is perceptive in pointing out the title as initially referent to those considered to have been martyred and finally referent to the only true martyr, Mr. Shin.

Kim, Richard. Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood. New York: Praeger, 1970. Recalling that the Japanese invaders forced Koreans to abandon their own names when the Japanese occupied the country from 1932 to 1945, Kim paints seven vivid scenes from his boyhood. Although this book does not deal with Kim’s fiction, it does provide interesting insight into his background and the reasons behind the drawing of certain themes.

Valdés, Mario J. “Faith and Despair: A Comparative Study of a Narrative Theme.” Hispania 49 (September, 1966): 373-379. Valdés likens the theme and narrative structure of The Martyred to Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1933; Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, 1956). His observations of the similarities of Kim’s story to Unamuno’s intensify a reader’s appreciation of both.

Walsh, Chad. “Another War Raged Within.” The New York Times Book Review (February 16, 1964): 1, 35. Walsh places The Martyred within “the great moral and psychological tradition of Job, Dostoevsky and Albert Camus.”