Han Kang’s novel Human Acts (2014) deals with the traumatic collective memory of the Gwangju Uprising (1980). In order to understand the text’s multifarious treatments of various traumatic memories, our paper investigates certain key textual elements—visceral descriptions of wounded bodies, usage of the second-person narration, a written account of a dramatic performance within the text, and the generic slippage between fiction and non-fiction. We aim to show how the text problematises the binary oppositions commonplace in both trauma studies and memory studies. We find that the text’s nuanced engagement with traumatic memories renders the same as sometimes fragmentary, at other times incomplete, and sometimes simply silenced, by coercion or by choice. We also find that the text deftly transcends such binaries as individual and collective memory, remembering and forgetting, memory and history, self and other, and so on. Further, using the notion of ‘palimpsest bodies’, we highlight Kang’s layered treatment of trauma and memory, and the ethical issues of postmemory engagements. Thus, our examination of the text and the results it yields point towards the fact that traumatic memories are highly complex in nature, and individual survivors of collective traumas have highly personalised responses to them. When it comes to understanding the workings of traumatic memories, especially as represented in literature, no rigid critical lens will do, and no sets of binaries can be deemed sacrosanct.