How does the author use imagery in the novel, Winter in Sokcho?

The novel features evocative descriptions of places and people, which are used for symbolic effect. For instance, the narrator's description of the North Korean border — “Skeletal remains of villages on either side of the road. Cardboard boxes, plastic waste, blue metal sheets...Gangwon Province had been left to rot since the war” (37) — symbolically speaks to the desolation of the narrator's life, devoid as it is of genuine intimacy or any sense of direction. The novel's atmosphere of despair is also developed through the narrator's descriptions of cold, as when she sees boats on the waterfront “rotting, imprisoned in ice” (85). Later, her grotesque description of the girl who is recovering from plastic surgery removing her bandages symbolizes the narrator's disgust about the girl's choice to change her appearance in this way: “I could see the wounds weeping as the skin was exposed...She looked like a burn victim, the face neither a man's nor a woman's. She dug a nail into her cheek and scratched. Rooted around. Dug. Raked. Pale pink flakes crumbled into her lap, onto the tiled floor” (124).