In her 2024 Nobel Prize interview, Han Kang stated that the significance of stories is that it gives “this ability to feel the interior of another. It is a very precious ability.” Most importantly for Kang, stories are exercises in empathy, uniting human experiences across different circumstances. Disturbing yet compelling, The Vegetarian attempts to peer into the interior of Yeong-hye, whose morbid dreams lead her to entirely revoke animal product consumption. The novel details not only her shifting ideology but also her warping sense of identity as she strives to become a tree, the ultimate peaceful entity, to atone for her life of meat-eating. Kang explicates such a personal change as one with radical potential which sends tremors through the domestic and patriarchal boundaries that confine women.
The most intriguing aspect of the book is how Yeong-hye’s story is conveyed entirely outside of her. Part one, ‘The Vegetarian’, is told by her husband, while part two, ‘Mongolian Mark’, is told by her brother-in-law. Her husband, Mr. Cheong, is an unambitious man who finds an almost clinical pleasure in his wife’s plainness. Once she becomes more distant, he feels his control over her waning. The brother-in-law, never given a name, is fascinated with Yeong-hye; their relationship is difficult to categorize since it represents both her liberation and her manipulation.
Narrated by her sister In-Hye, part three, ‘Flaming Trees’, juxtaposes the previously mentioned and distinctly repulsive male perspectives. In-hye is dealing with her own marital issues and worsening mental health, leading to periods of isolation and haunting dreams. They are two sides of the same coin—In-hye collapses inwards while Yeong-hye uses her body to rebel—and when put together, their characters feel slightly cliché, especially since it suggests hereditary female ‘madness.’ Regardless, each perspective is well defined and allows for a clear sense of the characters.
The only direct encounters we have with Yeong-hye are in her dreams, and, in true dream fashion, they are puzzling and highly allegorical. Kang’s prose is hypnotic in these sequences, and she moves seamlessly from one image to the other. The dreams describe carnality and savagery that, despite its abstractness, made me queasy. It is quite fitting that Yeong-hye’s psychological shift happens within and as a consequence of the dream space; it is free from temporality and spatial restrictions, containing endless imaginative possibilities that contrast her oppressive reality.
I felt less like a reader than I did a voyeur—I was constantly circling Yeong-hye in an attempt to figure her out. My understanding of Yeong-hye is incomplete and unsatisfied because the narrators’ own desires and prejudices inevitably skew her image. Obscuring her, I realize, emphasizes what is really important about her story: the cruelty of others that she is subject to and wants to renounce.
Yeong-hye’s obsession with becoming a tree is a struggle against the inherent violence of being human. Kang ultimately deems it impossible, if not extremely difficult, to be both human and non-violent. While the novel is mainly a commentary on nonconformity, it is also a skillful character analysis and interrogation of small-scale human brutality. It is incoherent at times, but will certainly leave an impression on the reader that invokes a sense of injustice, awe, repulsion, sympathy, confusion, or maybe even an aversion to meat.
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