Language and Words

Throughout the novel, the unnamed woman’s profound and unusual relationship with words helps to communicate the intense power of language. In Greek Lessons, Han presents words as deeply odd and intensely potent entities. Early in the novel, she describes the unnamed woman’s early relationship with language; the woman becomes obsessed with words, noting that “the only person who knew that her life was split violently in two was herself. The words she’d jotted down in the back of her diary wriggled about of their own volition to form unfamiliar sentences. Now and then, words would thrust their way into her sleep like skewers, startling her awake several times a night” (10-11). Here, words appear to the woman as living beasts, capable of sharply “startling her awake” (11). Language possesses a mystical and physical power; the woman acknowledges that it splits her life...