The Orphan Master's Son Themes

In the world of The Orphan Master's Son, actual reality is unimportant; all that matters is what the official story is. Johnson shows us a North Korea that advances its agenda by suppressing indivi...

If you've spent any time with Greek tragedies, you might come to the conclusion that suffering helps us gain knowledge and grow as individuals and as a society.Well, maybe that's true in a fairly n...

When Jun Do sees the hallway full of family pictures in the Senator's home, he makes an important discovery: families can be happy. It's revolutionary for this orphan not only to see generations in...

The political life of North Korea revolves entirely around the will and whim of one person: the Dear Leader. Kim Jong Il does his communism Stalin style: he's a total dictator, and in his system, p...

Change is not for the weak of heart in The Orphan Master's Son. In this world, when we talk about transformation, we're not talking about touchy-feely kind personal improvement. Nearly all personal...

Ah, truthiness. You can thank Stephen Colbert for coming up with this truly ridiculous term to describe something that seems like truth but really isn't. Truthiness is "...the truth we want to exis...

North Korean characters in The Orphan Master's Son often respond to foreign cultures with extreme distrust, fueled by the propaganda fed to them through loudspeakers that are hooked up in everyone'...

Yeah, this is North Korea, folks: personal freedom is not a thing. Every aspect of an individual's life—schooling, work, sex, death—is a gift from the state. It comes as no surprise, then, that...

In The Orphan Master's Son, Jun Do is introduced to us as a boy without choices. Abused by the Orphan Master and facing a life of hardship, he makes some pretty questionable moral decisions to pres...

In The Orphan Master's Son, Jun Do begins life as an orphan, unloved and expendable, and spends a good part of his time floating around without anything to lose. But at the moment when the Captain...