Point of View

Winter in Sokcho is narrated in first-person and past tense by an unnamed 24-year-old woman who lives in Sokcho, a resort city on the border of South and North Korea. She reveals very few biographical details about herself, but she does note that she attended university in Seoul and that her father was a Frenchman who abandoned her mother after seducing her. The reader can infer based on this last detail that her interest in Kerrand, who is a Frenchman old enough to be her father, is a product of the fascination she has with the father she never knew. All of the narrator's motivations and concerns must be determined via inference by the reader. She never says she does not love her boyfriend Jun-oh, but she treats him with almost total disinterest, rarely returning his affections. She does not admit that she feels stifled...