Week One: Remembering the Deceased

This past week, I’ve been introduced to two different types of memorials and what the purpose of war memorials are. Allyson Booth, the author of Postcards from the Trenches, explains that “a catafalque is a platform made to hold a coffin, while a cenotaph is a memorial to someone whose corpse lies elsewhere” (Booth 33). I found it quite interesting that Booth called cenotaphs “unoccupied spaces” that the living may attend, because the memorials are just boundaries of space due to the fact that the corpses are long lost. Anyway, we were given a homework assignment on researching a specific memorial and analyzing it. As a person that grew up in Korea for about half of my life, I’ve always been interested in Korea’s history so I chose the Korean War Memorial. Apparently, the Korean War is also called the “Forgotten War,” which I thought was ironic because it is not easy to “forget” such a big event. As I looked for more information about the memorial, I found out that it is made up of three parts: a mural, 19 statues of soldiers, and a pool of remembrance. The mural wall consists of the names of soldiers that passed away and about 2400 photographs of the soldiers that fought in the war. I read that the photographs were specifically placed on the murals so that when viewed from far away, it would create the appearance of the mountain ranges of Korea. Immediately after I read this, I thought to myself that since mountains have a lot of hills, it could represent the ups and downs of the war that the soldiers faced. Also, I remember a classmate that researched the same memorial saying that the statues and the mural leads up to the pool of remembrance, which could mean that the soldiers are moving towards death. Many other inferences were made about the memorial, but as I heard more analyses, I began to wonder if they were true. A while ago, I had a conversation with my friend about analyzing literature and how sometimes we overcomplicate things a bit. He told me that he read an article saying that an author used the color blue in his story just because it was his favorite color, but that English teachers viewed it as a sad color which set the mood as gloomy. Could this be applied to what we did with war memorials? Are we analyzing what the architects purposely used or are we just overthinking too much..?