The image of the fountain in Eun-Suk's chapter really stuck with me. It symbolises how society moves on after a major crisis but also, how people in power want society to move on and do everything they can to push past the uprising events that almost took their power. And also, very personal to Eun-Suk, her survivor guilt. She gets to live on and she can't escape the question 'why me?'

After she receives back the almost completely blacked out copy of a manuscript, she thinks of the fountain, how it dares to be in use because there's nothing to celebrate. The uprising might be over, but the oppression continues, the censoring is taking over. Eun-Suk questions multiple times why she is still alive, despite being everywhere where people were murdered. She can't move on because there's no reason for her survival but she desperately tries to find it. She denies herself and her surroundings happiness: she wants the snowflakes to not be pretty because they shouldn't be. She calls the provincial administration repeatedly to make them turn off the fountain. They always put her off, but one time a person answers:

What do you expect us to do about a fountain that does exactly what it was built to do? Forget about it and concentrate on the school.

The administration focuses on the 'forget about it'-part. They want the fountain turned on to make life feel normal again. And how could Eun-Suk feel normal, after everything? It's only when she sees the play that she deemed beyond saving because of the censoring in the theatre, she realises that that's not the only way to see the fountain. That more people have survived and these people remember. That all these beautiful things (the fountain, the snowflakes) are not signs of time passing and people forgetting but time passing and people remembering. That you have to move on to carry the people who can't do that anymore with you