Imagine each day rising like any other, devoid of any promise of change. The house awakens in a routine of familiar sounds, the clock ticking in time with habitual rhythms, and Yeong-hye, silent and enigmatic, seems to fit the mold of the ideal wife. But then, almost without thinking, she decides that meat must not enter her body. No drama, no speeches. She stops eating meat. Full stop. There’s no spiritual conviction or passionate declaration—no pivot towards wellbeing. It’s simply a renunciation. A “no more.” And the gesture, which seems a harmless quirk, unfurls as a quiet revolution. This is The Vegetarian, the novel with which Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature 2024, presses on the sore spots of norms we hold unquestioningly.
Giving up meat is more than refusing a food; it’s rejecting a system that, since her birth, has governed every aspect of her life—from her role at the table to the silence of her bedroom. Her husband, who had never noticed anything remarkable about her, feels shaken. His masculinity, perhaps a little wounded, wonders how this quiet, invisible woman could suddenly turn into a problem he cannot understand, let alone control.
Control. Domination. Obedience.
Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is the first step in a chain of challenges. During a dinner at her parents’ home, her refusal sparks a comedy of errors as her mother fails to persuade her and her father tries to force her to eat meat, only for Yeong-hye to seize a knife, finally convincing everyone of her insistence. Her refusal seeps into every corner of the home, from the kitchen to the bedroom, through the parlor where her bewildered family attempts to coax her back to order. Her father, her husband, and her brother-in-law—all view her decision as an insult, a slight to the expectations placed on her. And so, in her refusal to conform, Yeong-hye begins retreating, stepping away from every human tie that binds her to the world.
The novel unfolds through three distinct perspectives, though Yeong-hye remains always in the shadows, an enigma observed by all but understood by none. In the first part, The Vegetarian, her husband narrates, interspersed with Yeong-hye’s inner voice. From his practical, disillusioned view, her decision to stop eating meat seems not only irrational but a deeply personal rebellion that upsets the balance of his daily life. His bewilderment grows as he sees no trace of the woman he once knew, which is why Han Kang chooses to silence her voice in the two subsequent parts, allowing Yeong-hye’s dramatic monologues to fade away.
The second part, The Mongolian Mark, follows Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist whose lens turns his obsession into a canvas. From his perspective, Yeong-hye’s deteriorating body becomes a source of morbid aesthetic fascination. For him, her transformation sparks an inexpressible artistic idea, a discomforting revelation that pushes him toward a disturbing boundary where his respect for her autonomy dissolves in his impulses.
Finally, in Blossoming in Darkness, Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye, speaks. Her narration is delicate and restrained, hinting at the complexity of their relationship, their family history, and her reflections on her sister’s fragility. Through In-hye, we glimpse a bond woven with tenderness and suffering, a perspective in which another’s pain mirrors the hidden depths she has learned to conceal.
For Yeong-hye’s family, her rebellion brands her as a traitor to everyday life, someone who defies the family structure within which her husband, especially, believed he lived comfortably. None of them see her as Yeong-hye; she is simply a vessel for their frustrations and expectations, to the point where her identity becomes a battleground that drives her away, not only from others but from herself.
But what happens when a woman’s silence begins to take on a vegetal texture? When her dreams, haunting her nights, fill with blood and leaves, with roots that anchor her to a life she no longer wants?
In those dreams, Yeong-hye finds the refuge denied to her in the waking world. There, she can confront her violence, her fear, without anyone demanding explanations. And the deeper she sinks into these dark dreams, the more she distances herself from the noise, the closer she draws to a peace she cannot explain.
Yeong-hye’s irreverent stance crystallizes in her admission that she no longer wants to be a woman, a wife, or anything that must obey. A disquieting urge to become something plant-like seizes her, a radical rejection that the others—the “normals”—cannot permit.
She must be corrected, saved, and returned to the fold.
But Yeong-hye responds with silence. A void impossible to fill with words. Or with meat.
Han Kang’s novel is the story of a renunciation. Yeong-hye has no desire to explain herself or return to normalcy. She wishes to sink into the ground, to vanish into the earth, to renounce her eyes, her hands, her sex—everything that once defined her. Her path, paradoxical and desperate, has no clear destination, for she knows she cannot stop being human, stop dreaming, stop waking with the echo of a nightmare in her chest. Yet she also cannot help desiring it, with a force that unsettles and disarms those who try to bring her back to reason.
The Vegetarian leaves us facing a cloudy mirror, where Yeong-hye’s desire to escape from the world confronts us with our prisons. What remains is the vegetal silence. The stillness that, like a forest, seems to contain all life and death in its thick silence.
With hands almost transparent now, her skin ever paler, Yeong-hye renounces humanity.
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