The Tale of the Rabbit#3 commentary
korean classic literature
What the turtle displays here can be read as a kind of use of Theory of Mind.
The turtle is not simply blurting out random falsehoods. He is running a second mind inside his own head, a simulation of the rabbit’s mind.
What he demonstrates cannot be adequately described as mere loyalty. Through sheer observation, he instantly picks up on a few crucial data points: that the rabbit responds to the honorific “Master,” and that he is vulnerable to forms of lack such as the desire for recognition and the dream of upward mobility.
When information is processed fluently, people are more likely to accept it as true. The turtle overwhelms the rabbit’s critical thinking with a smooth, uninterrupted narrative that leaves no room for objection.
The Dragon King, meanwhile, sets the wrong KPI from the start.
In what should have been an interview for the task “Who is capable of bringing me the rabbit’s liver?”, he instead asks, “Who is most loyal to me?” The turtle gets the job by offering the bizarre logic that “my ancestors ate the flesh of loyal subjects.”
That has nothing to do with the actual skills required: deception, persuasion, or the ability to survive on land.
If the turtle had been loyal but lacked verbal cunning, he would not even have managed to start a conversation with the rabbit. He would have been eaten by the mountain beasts before accomplishing anything. The Dragon King sent out a “faithful servant,” but by luck that servant also happened to possess the talents of a natural-born con artist.
This is not a matter of moral virtue. It is a matter of cognitive skill.
The Dragon King’s real assignment is “deceive the rabbit and bring him here,” but the question he effectively asks is, “How loyal were your ancestors?” Systems demand legitimacy. Reality demands technique. The turtle is a deceptive technician who bridges that gap with remarkable precision.
It would be too simplistic to treat the rabbit, who falls for all this, as nothing more than a fool.
What happens to him is a much more intricate process in which self-deception is produced by the interplay between lack and the desire to see only what one already wants to believe.
The scene where the rabbit first mistakes the turtle for a pot lid or a lump of cow dung is not merely comic. It shows the rabbit’s first lack: he knows almost nothing about the underwater world.
A second lack is that, within mountain society, he does not really have a name. He is just one more frivolous little creature. When the turtle addresses him as “Master Rabbit,” that functions as proof of social existence. Before asking the rabbit to give up his liver, the turtle first feeds him something like a narcotic: a social identity.
A third lack emerges more directly. The rabbit asks whether there are any officials in the underwater court who are educated, and whether any of them are large in stature. To the turtle, those questions would have sounded like this: “I am afraid they will look down on me because I am not well educated,” and “I have always had a complex about my small size.”
The turtle’s response there is excellent.
“There are none.”
In one move, he soothes the rabbit’s anxieties and reinforces the fantasy that in that world he could become a unique and incomparable being. With every question, the rabbit’s escape route narrows, and the turtle’s net grows tighter.
The rabbit’s deepest tragedy lies in his groundless self-confidence.
He probably spent his life thinking, “I am this clever, I speak this well, so why do the mountain beasts look down on me?” Then the turtle appears and tells him, “You have the qualities of a minister greater even than the tiger.”
The rabbit’s mind receives this as a truth finally discovered. It is the final confirmation of the self-image he has been waiting for his entire life. The rabbit is deceived by the turtle, but at the same time he sells himself over to the lie he has always wanted to believe, borrowing the turtle’s voice to do it.
What is interesting is that the turtle works by assuming a certain universality, and those assumptions turn out to be correct.
“Surely the underwater world, like the mountain world, has situations where capable people are not properly recognized.”
“Surely high office comes with privilege.”
“Surely even in the mountains there is some equivalent of office and rank.”
In the previous episode, the abalone produces an accurate image of the rabbit on the basis of a groundless memory from a previous life. Here, a similar pattern repeats itself. The turtle does not know these things for certain. He simply projects the logic of his own world outward, and it works.
The rabbit does the same thing. Instead of studying the specificity of the underwater world, he projects onto it the grammar of the mountain world that he already knows.
The premises offered by the turtle, that power is sweet, that ability ought to be rewarded, that there exists a heroic narrative in which one leaves home and succeeds elsewhere, all sound so universal and self-evident to the rabbit that he fails to see the specific purpose hidden inside them, namely that he is being brought there to surrender his liver.
The turtle’s fraud succeeds precisely because universality really does operate. The mountain world too has hierarchy, lack, and a desire for recognition. These exist as premises no one even thinks to question.
In other words, this work says, “Do not trust principles,” while the very basis of that warning is the fact that principles really do work. For a work to satirize universality, universality has to exist. And because it exists, the object of satire is precisely the person who is fooled by it.
The message “question the principle” itself stands on top of the actual functioning of principle. I think this concretely shows the major tension in this work, the same tension I mentioned in the previous commentary, between principle and efficacy.
When the turtle speaks about the Dragon Palace, when the rabbit speaks about the mountain, and when the turtle rebuts the rabbit’s description of mountain life, it is hard to say that any of it is simply false.
The turtle speaks of the splendor and safety of the Dragon Palace, safety at least in the sense that there are no tigers there. The rabbit speaks of the beautiful four seasons in the mountains. What each of them hides is only the reverse side of that landscape.
In that sense, what they offer is selective truth.
We reconstruct the world by gathering fragments of appearances, the fragments each of us wants to see. The turtle gives the rabbit exactly the fragments he wants, and the rabbit eagerly pieces them together into his own ruin.
By this point, the rabbit is already moving in a fixed direction.
His lack, his self-confidence, the turtle’s selective truths, and even the scarcity effect of “this offer will not remain open forever” all converge into a single line of movement. He is no longer deciding whether to go. He is only resolving his last remaining anxieties one by one.
“There will not be danger, right?”
“They will not look down on me, right?”
The turtle understands this, which is why his answers grow shorter and shorter.
In this story, the fox is the only one who speaks the truth, at least from the observer’s standpoint.
“Water is dangerous by nature. Official life is no small danger either. If you go, you will die.”
There is no lie in what the fox says. And yet truth fails.
Earlier, the bear accurately identified the core problem in the mountain assembly, but changed nothing. Speaking correctly in public and actually moving the order of things are entirely different matters. The fox is a variation on that same theme. Truth can neither change the system nor save a friend.
The fox can only say, “Do not go.” He cannot offer an alternative. He cannot say, “You can become prime minister. You can enjoy wealth and glory. There is a world where your worth will be recognized.”
What the fox is really saying is probably this: “It is better to stay here and go on being ignored.”
The turtle does not even feel the need to refute him head-on. He says, in effect, “That fox once asked me to take him along, but I refused because his heart was rotten. He is only trying to stop you now because he wants your place for himself.”
To contaminate the motives of the one speaking truth: this is the most efficient way to neutralize truth without ever having to refute it.
Everything the rabbit imagined about the Dragon Palace was made entirely of language. Wealth and glory came from the turtle’s mouth alone. The rabbit had seen none of it with his own eyes.
But now, for the first time, physical reality rises before him.
Endless water. A scene so vast that he cannot tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. This is the first moment when he confronts, sensorially, what he has actually agreed to.
By now the turtle’s answers are openly flimsy. And still the rabbit accepts them. He has already turned the fox into an enemy. He has already heard back from the turtle a humiliating picture of mountain life. Most of all, to abandon the narrative of “I will become a great minister in the Dragon Palace” would mean returning to being a nameless mountain creature once again.
Then the soldier tells the rabbit the whole truth.
The Dragon King is ill. The rabbit’s liver is needed. That is why the turtle came to capture him. And the soldier adds, “What I cannot understand is you. If it was obvious you would die by coming here, why did you abandon your homeland and follow him all this way?”
The soldier is speaking to the rabbit, but the question is really addressed to the audience.
Can we honestly be sure that we are not riding on the turtle’s back ourselves?
Or are we, too, in the middle of delivering our own livers, deceived by the universal premises we wanted to believe in?
What is your answer?