| Abstract | This article examines how Roh Moo Hyun, the 16th President of South Korea, was remembered during the several months following his suicide in May 2009. For this purpose, the article focuses on major commemorative texts about Roh published during this period and identifies three recurring themes in the emerging commemorative narrative about him: (1) a defiant dreamer who aspired to build a good society, (2) a nonmainstream politician who challenged the status quo and therefore was destroyed, and (3) a democratic president of common people. Building upon sociological approaches to collective memory, this article situates these themes in the larger sociopolitical context of contemporary Korea and argues that the living memory of Roh helps us understand the role of collective memory in promoting group cohesion, the deeply political nature of memory, and the importance of cultural symbols to the interactive process of constructing the commemorative narrative.
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