2025 Sejong Writing Competition
Winning Entries :: Essays :: Adult third place (tie)
Title: O. Cuniculus offers the reader, through exhausted eyes, a Kafkaesque picture of the disposability of the modern individual.
The reader cannot help but fall into the loneliness of the protagonist’s absurd, isolated life. The ending, however, offers an ambiguous hint of redemption. The main character’s, and later his replacement’s, appeals to the apartment doors of their sought-after colleagues provide a window into their internal states. The responseless barrier absorbs the depressed cries, interrogations flowing freely with no expectation of acknowledgement. There is no rebuttal or rejection at the hopelessness of interaction. The man walks away as the rabbit does when released by the owner (“it didn’t make a sound”). (p.11) The urge to appeal has been washed out by the repetition of indifference (“it vanished into the bushes as if it knew what it was supposed to do.”) (p.11). Abandonment is so standard in the modern dystopia Pyun paints that it is accepted without a second thought.
The word “abandon” is used only at the beginning and end of the text, but throughout the story it is clear that everything in this world is temporary and disposable. The short length of the protagonist’s stay is precisely the reason he brings the rabbit home. It also allows him to neglect its care because “he was just going to get rid of it anyway.” (p. 6) The reader may conclude that the temporary workers are regarded in the same way by their workplace.
The writer slices the text with repetitive sequences that stack as neatly as the “towering stack” (p. 3) of papers on the superior’s desk. The work is always the same (“Doing the same work everyday…this routine never varied.”) (p. 2) The knocking on the protagonist’s own door, fifteen minutes after the end of work, repeats systematically every day. The schedule is kept relative to the workday, just as the protagonist adopts his habit of standing and sitting at five intervals daily. His repetition of the ritual even while working at home demonstrates how completely entrenched he is in the daily cycle. He appears to realize his condition more deeply with each subsequent reaction: a laugh, a rap on the head, tears.
This soul-sucking routine combined with the company’s absurd insistence on “any kind of data” lends a strong Kafkaesque tone to the unnamed country. The monotony catches the workers in its wheels, lulls them to sleep with its tireless drone, and spits them out bloody, abandoned and half-mad. Occasionally, a violent scream escapes in full force to battle the deafening drum. A worker “kick[s] on the door, bang[s] on it with his fists, and yell[s]”. (p. 5) A man, an anybody from an apartment in the city, brandishes a knife in a threatening video. The churning continues, and soon forgets the interruption.
Each outburst of violence seeps into the collective mind, deepening a chasm of distrust between neighbors who “hurry to press the button” (p. 7) to close elevator doors to avoid being trapped in with another. The destructive urge stems from isolation and then, once manifested, emphasizes its necessity in the minds of the victimized.
The lack of interaction between individuals is highlighted in the deconstruction of the question and answer form of dialogue. Answers are given to questions that the character knows “no one is going to ask,” (p. 10) and questions of well-being are left unanswered because it seems that the inquirer is “more interested in airing his grievances than in finding him.” (p.11) The only complete dialogues center around work, and the protagonist latches on to even these interactions with an evident desperation (“The man asked the question quickly, because the section leader was already lowering his head to dismiss him… The man was happy to finally be understood.”) (p. 4). Though the majority of his colleagues seem wholly ambivalent to human interaction, the unidentified man at the protagonist’s door suggests that others wish to escape their solitude as well.
The rabbit serves as a placeholder for the relationship the man cannot have, albeit offering only a one-sided one. It asks and answers nothing. It does not impose, but does not contribute. It is a “freeloader,” (p. 1) not a net zero, because to exist in this world is to cost something. It serves as a mirror to our nameless protagonist, who is “captivated” by its eyes before his decay and later grows so uncomfortable by them that he blocks it from his view. It is unintruding, a passive receiver to its owner’s changes of demeanor and will. It attracts annoyance and then hatred from all who possess it. Does it absorb these feelings or reflect them back to the producer? The equilibrium of its weight when it is re-abandoned seems to imply the latter.
If the rabbit’s return to the park is something to bemoan is not clear. When the rabbit is first found, the man chafes “to think such a being had been stranded…for so long that its white fur had turned filthy.” (p. 1) Yet when he abandons his office life, the change that most gratifies him is that he no longer wears a white shirt. One questions, then, whether the dirt and the tomb referred to in the title of the work are truly negative. Since the rabbits abandoned in the parks will “die eventually, on their own,” should one assume the “only wild place left” is the aforementioned repose? (p. 2) Yet these spaces resemble a tomb less than the foul-smelling apartment in which the protagonist fears he could “rot away…undiscovered by anyone.” (p. 7) He likewise sniffs at the door of his missing superior, in case his room has transformed into that final resting place, but in the end, both the superior and himself seem to escape its clutches.