Confession
(참회록)

Shame is a recurring theme in Yun Dong-ju's work. Perhaps he saw the world around him and the whole situation including himself as shameful, which is understandable given the dire state of his people at the time. After all, the Korean people had been helplessly adrift for decades seemingly without anyone at the helm. They didn't even have a state to call their own as it had lost sovereignty well before he was born.

He laments why it has to be this way, and wonders which bygone dynasty's legacy lives in him, because the reality is so unbearably onerous. He goes on chastising himself, asking what has been the point of his twenty-four odd years of life, only to remind himself in the next breath that he will have to write another confessional for the very deplorable way of such a thought, as if stuck in a vicious circle of self-pity and self-loathing. His works are full of such agonizing observations and despair about the insurmountable walls around him. He alternates, dwelling on such an anguish when he's down, and then picking himself up with a renewed hope that pushes him to continue to fight his way forward. All this arouses sympathy from the reader. It would have been a story of such a great redemption, a proof that justice prevails in the end, if Yun had come to see his people finally become free and autonomous, but, alas, it was not to be. Yun died six months before the day he had been so anxiously waiting for all his life.