Switching back and forth between omniscient first-and third-person viewpoints, the initial segment of the book is named after Clio, the Greek muse of historical and heroic verse. This segment of the book involves the historical backdrop of Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon and the significant effect she had before dying at the young age of seventeen. The incoherent segment details the historical backdrop of Korea under Japanese rule in the initial portion of the twentieth century. The messed up, fragmentary language utilized here and all through the rest of the novel is intended to show the trouble of finding and holding one's voice and speaking out with it. Cha additionally accentuates the more serious threat and trouble of not speaking out, and how silence can be the demise of a person's national identity.
The muse of expert articulation and pioneer all things considered in Calliope, Cha details her mother Hyun Soon Huo's inheritance. Born in Manchuria, Huo continues to live in China to maintain a strategic distance from the Japanese standard of her Korean heritage. Huo, only eighteen years of age, lives in a village with other Korean displaced people. She is disturbed about leaving her country, yet her soul is dauntless. Huo's native tongue is prohibited, and she is compelled to communicate in the obligatory language of the region. In any case, Huo communicates in her ancestral language in obscurity, to herself, as a methods returning home and keeping up her identity.
Urania is the muse of astronomy and all inclusive love. Cha portrays in detail a nurse drawing blood from the taleteller's gripped left arm, in this tale. Torment and enduring is a characteristic common in every tale, and the powerlessness to express said anguish fortifies the feelings of Koreans who were deprived of their first language. Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, is the subject of the following section. Cha's prose depicts a woman submitting to a display, as she leans back with a blanket prepared to watch a visual introduction on a cinema screen. Cha noticed that “the illusion that the act of viewing is to make alteration of the visible.” Cha recommends that to see is a certain something, however to verbalize what you see is undeniably additionally challenging, in this way progressively significant.
In Erato, the muse of mimicry and sensual verse, a woman portrays her stay to a movie house, from purchasing a ticket, remaining in line, picking a seat, to watching a surge of images wash over her as she sits in the main column. Elitere, a plain incorrect spelling of Euterpe, is the muse of music and expressive verse. In this tale, Cha wonderfully communicates the idea of memory, time, and the idleness that quietness yields. Thalia is the muse of comedy and ideal verse. Cha annals the ungainliness of a first telephone call and the trouble a woman has in articulating herself via telephone. This, by and by, emphasizes the significance of linguistic expression.
The muse of dance and choral dramatization, the dull quietness of death is gracefully verbalized in Terpsichore. The silence of the living is similar to the permanence of death, again focusing on the need to discover and utilize one's inalienable voice. Polymnia is the muse of consecrated psalms. A young woman fills two jars with well water subsequent to navigating a huge span in the summer heat. The woman sees a girl far away by the well and hears a boisterous reverberation as the woman draws near. The girl opens her mouth as though to talk, yet no expression is heard. Like the others, this tale fortifies the aching anguish of words, contemplations, and vocal articulations refused from presence.
