A woman, destroyed: a review of "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang

The vegetarian is a novel by the South-Korean author Han Kang, published in 2007 and set in modern-day Seoul.

The protagonist of the story is Yeong-hye, a young part-time graphic artist and housewife who decides to become vegetarian after a dream. This choice deteriorates her relationship with her husband until they divorce, and it evolves to the point where she is willing to become an actual plant.

The novel is structured in three parts told by three different narrators. The first section, told by Yeong-Hye’s husband, is dedicated to their relationship, from the beginning until the moment she refused to cook, eat and serve meat.

Even before the woman’s decision and the subsequent events, we can easily understand that their relationship is not healthy: Yeong-Hye is perceived as “insignificant” by the man that is supposed to love her and, instead, seems to prefer by far her older sister In-Hye. Nevertheless, he feels undeserving of something better in the first place, attributing his fragility to the insecurity related to the dimension of his penis.

Here, we can remark an important detail on how the characters talk about things and themselves. Indeed, they think thoughts that are so intimate that they would hardly be shared with other people and, should this happen, the characters would not be benefiting from it at all. Therefore, Han Kang enters their mind and probably paraphrased the revelation on the fragility of Yeong-Hye’s husband to a huge extent.

The second part is told by In-Hye’s husband and it deals with the events between Yeong-Hye’s divorce and the start of her rehab in a psychiatric facility. After the divorce, In-Hye’s husband realizes that he has feelings for his sister-in-law.

This apparently genuine feeling degenerates until it turns into a whole sexual fantasy which is completely dehumanizing: using his job as a multimedia artist as an excuse, he invites Yeong-Hye and one of his colleagues to star in an erotic short film where the two, with flowers painted on their bodies, were supposed to have sex.

Upon realizing that the woman seems strongly attracted to the flower painted on the body of her “partner”, which hints at her ending, Yeong-Hye’s brother-in-law decides to exploit this to sleep with her, and gets caught by In-Hye.

The last part is the only one told by a feminine point of view, namely by In-Hye. She is the only narrator who is genuinely interested in Yeong-Hye’s condition: she pays visit to her, takes care of her, listens to her, tries to understand her and seemingly manages to do so by linking her transformation to the trauma caused by their violent father.

Besides being the first time where us reades are able to dive deeper on the condition of the protagonist, it is the first time where we are not shown any type of erotic love (eros) but, instead, we deal with sisterly love and genuine care (agape).

We are dealing with an extremely layered story, which can lead to many interpretations. Firstly, the third-person points of view prevent Yeong-Hye from owning her narrative completely. It’s her story, but she is not the one who tells it and her point of view remains unknown during the entire novel.

The narrators don’t know much more either: even when the protagonist talks about her dream, nobody seems interested in understanding where she is coming from until In-Hye says that she also makes dreams, instead of silencing her. While reading, especially in the first two part, this miscommunication is clear: Yeong-Hye expresses herself, everybody talks, nobody listens.

Despite the more understanding tone of the last part, the protagonist still fails to reclaim her own story and internal struggle, which remains almost undecodable for the people surrounding her.

Moreover, this narration reflects two opposing dynamics of the main character: an inner one and an outer one. The inner dynamic is dehumanizing - transforming into a plant - whereas the outer dynamic goes the opposite direction, with the narrator humanizing her more and more with their gaze, which is the only one available.

Nevertheless, the sufferance and decline of Yeong-Hye have not only ignited something inside of her, but also something inside her family: her dream and its consequences cause a series of self-fulfilling break-ups, her divorce and her sister’s, unveiling in fact the falseness of those relationships based on hypocritical conventions.

The change of the protagonist serves therefore as a catalyst for further disruptions in the life of her loved ones, like a vine growing on the walls of a building until it turns green.

As you may have already figured out, I appreciated this book a lot. In 2020, while I was going through a reader’s block, it was the only story that has been capable to hook me to its pages by leading me to look for interpretations, hidden meanings and unsaid elements.

Generally speaking, if you like novels about families, oneiric and surreal stories with multiple points of view, this book is the right choice for you.

Have you read The Vegetarian? Did you enjoy it? Tell me in the comments!

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