How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #1
The key to fighting in the dark was no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you. (15)
Jun Do's entire existence is based entirely on storytelling ("I'm not an orphan, I'm not an orphan"), so it's interesting that he feels this strongly about dealing with reality in the darkness. There's something way more dangerous about making stuff up in the dark—it distracts you from the probability that something very nasty is right around the corner waiting to take you out. In the daylight world, however, Jun Do's take on things is quite different: the metaphorical darkness enveloping his life in North Korea is too hard to look at straight on.
Quote #2
It was dangerous to dream up people like that. If you did, they'd soon be in the tunnel with you. That happened many times when he remembered boys from Long Tomorrows. One slip and a boy was suddenly following you in the dark. He was saying things to you, asking you why you weren't the one who succumbed to the cold, why you weren't the one who fell in the paint vat... (18)
Jun Do survives the horror of his situation in life by staying focused on the task before him—in this case, navigating the darkness of the tunnels—and not allowing his mind and conscience to wander back over his past unsavory deeds. In doing so, he's treading a fine line between creating a new (but selective) narrative for himself and acknowledging the truth of a miserably painful past. This "tunnel vision"—pun totally intended—keeps Jun Do from being emotionally paralyzed by the necessary moral depravity that marks his early life.
Quote #3
She'd had a vision that humans would one day return to the oceans, growing flippers and blowholes, that humanity would become one again in the oceans, and there'd be no intolerance or war. (54)
The American rower (night shift) is really starting to go off the deep end as she moves through the dark waters. Jun Do hears her alternative version of the future and realizes that she's been closing her eyes to the darkness, letting her imagination run wild rather than grappling with the landscape around her. As he theorizes earlier, her inability to fully engage with the present task has allowed her mind to give life to all kinds of irrelevant and dangerous weirdness.