Writers generally care about justice, and perhaps it is a sense that they can right certain wrongs with pretty prose which first prompts many of us to put pen to paper. Yet with time, as the world has slowly changed, the injustices in focus have shifted too. Among recent novels, I remember being surprised at Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, which takes the injustice of humanity’s treatment of animals as its central theme, as some of J.M. Coetzee’s works had done previously. Despite its title, The Vegetarian, by the Korean writer Han Kang, the Nobel laureate in 2024, is not just about human mistreatment of animals. It is rather about human violence more broadly, and avenues for escaping it – not always ones we might expect.
The novel is divided into three parts, each with a different narrator and hence different angle. Three voices to guide us, yet the most important character is Yeong-hye, who is seen through others’ eyes but remains almost silent throughout a story that is nevertheless her own. It is she whose journey of rebellion begins with vegetarianism, but gradually morphs into something more complex. It is she whom, most of all, we as readers are trying to understand.
In “The Vegetarian”, the novel’s first part, things appear straightforward. As straightforward, in fact, as the viewpoint of Mr Cheong, Yeong-he’s wife. Mr Cheong is an asshole, the kind of casual misogynist I imagine many male readers may find themselves slightly unnerved by their proximity to, as I did. He works, expects his wife to know her place, to follow tradition and to keep silent. To him she is “unremarkable” – always a term of endearment, I have been reliably informed by my own girlfriend – until she stops eating meat. This sets off the novel’s drama, but it doesn’t cause any introspection on the part of Mr Cheong, who is incapable of such things.
Yeong-hye stops eating meat. She has a dream nobody around her really cares enough to try to understand, and then decides that enough is enough. Her existence becomes poisoned by constant nightmares and the first action she takes to protect herself is to remove the meat from the house. There’s a telling moment when Mr Cheong first finds his wife emptying the fridge – he accidentally steps on the squishy bags of meat on the floor because he was only looking straight ahead. This idea of sight is possibly a central one in The Vegetarian – what is seen, and what we would rather avert our eyes from.
Of course, as readers, we have to pay attention, and the text makes sure we see what others might not. “Beef for shabu-shabu, belly pork, two sides of black beef shin, some squid in a vacuum-packed bag, sliced eel that my mother-in-law had sent us from the countryside ages ago, dried croaker tied with yellow string, unopened packs of frozen dumplings and endless bundles of unidentified stuff dragged from the depths of the fridge.” This is just a list, a hallmark of realistic novel detail. But it’s also a lot of meat. All of which came from animals killed in conditions that were probably not exactly humane. It’s just the contents of a fridge-freezer, but at the same time it morphs into a tablet describing human-inflicted suffering.
Korea, as described here, is a society of meat eaters. Yeong-hye’s decision to abandon meat quickly throws her up against her family and her husband. When at a work dinner with Mr Cheong she refuses to eat meat, she tanks his career. When at a family lunch she does the same, her father actually forces her mouth open to make her eat the food while the rest of her family looks on passively or declares their shame at her behaviour. All this is utterly bizarre, if you think about it. A decision not to do something, which harms nobody, (and in fact protects animals), even if it may not be deemed praiseworthy should at least be easy enough to tolerate.
Yet instead, this minor act of rebellion brings to the surface all of the underlying demands (Korean) society places upon the individual, and in particular upon women, to obey their parents and their husbands. Everyone turns on poor Yeong-hye, even as we see just how much violence there is behind their society through their meat-eating, through their childrearing practices (Yeong-hye was beaten as a child), through their traditions. We see the power of society to enforce its norms even as The Vegetarian reveals the very insanity of those norms.
The second part of the novel, “Mongolian Mark”, takes us in a slightly different direction. Yeong-hye has already been “discarded” by her husband and lives on her own after a stint in a mental hospital, where she continues to break the rules by spending a lot of time in the nude, doing something suspiciously close to photosynthesising. We take the perspective of her sister In-hye’s husband, who is an artist. Like Yeong-hye, he is also haunted by a dream. His, however, concerns filming himself having sex with Yeong-hye while they are painted with flowers.
Such desires are neither wholly appropriate nor generally sensible to act upon. However, Yeong-hye has set herself outside of society, and this allows the artist to believe he can act as he wants with her. He is both disturbed and attracted by her, someone who is like a “Buddhist monk” with her “uncanny serenity.” Having cut herself off from society in her flat, Yeong-hye is able to do what she wants, including let herself be painted and taken advantage of. Eventually, the artist gets what he wants, less because Yeong-hye has consented than because she has already spiritually left her body behind. The experience is too strange to be sexual.
For the reader, it is only uncomfortable. Because Yeong-hye has essentially floated her spirit away, she is reduced to a body for her brother-in-law to use. But this just makes it very obvious how men can treat women – as bodies, nothing more. Especially as the moderate efforts the artist puts in to get close to Yeong-hye really involve no efforts to actually understand her or listen to what she has to say.
In the final section we follow In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, as she tries to take care of her sister, now permanently stored in a mental hospital in the countryside. Yeong-hye has continued her journey out of society, even geographically now. Where in the first part she refused to eat meat, and in the second attempted to photosynthesise, now she refuses to eat at all: “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” Now Yeong-hye’s goal is simply to wither away and become like a tree – silent and harmless.
If Mr Cheong were the uncaring voice of casual male misogyny, and In-hye’s husband the kind of predatory misogyny that waits for vulnerability, In-hye is interesting for being a far more reflective and responsible human being, even having a son, Ji-woo. She watches her sister’s decline with a kind of jealousy, for she herself cannot imagine throwing off social responsibilities, yet at the same time seems to long to. This jealousy is mixed with anger – because before Yeong-hye revealed the oppression of her world, In-hye had never been aware of it, or at least thought to question it.
Although it is something we increasingly debate, doctors traditionally have had to keep patients alive whatever their own wishes, and as Yeong-hye no longer eats this becomes an increasing challenge for those around her, one resolved with needles and drips, straitjackets and a screaming Yeong-hye. There’s something truly disturbing in the details of this forcing of life upon someone who has dared to question its value, a final attempt to control Yeong-hye and deprive her of any choice, any control over her own body. Meanwhile In-hye, herself increasingly sleepless, struggling as a (now single) mother and as a business owner, finds herself ever more attracted to Yeong-hye’s own fate, and the strange freedom it represents.
While reading The Vegetarian there were two recent works I thought of for their overlap in themes: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your plough over the bones of the dead, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Tokarczuk’s novel has vegetarianism and human cruelty towards animals as its focus, but there was less of a sense of rage at society’s treatment of humans themselves. Partly this was because of the book’s rural setting and isolated protagonist, where The Vegetarian is by contrast a very much more urban, social novel, set in Seoul. But partly this seems to be because the narrator of that novel was just more interested in animals than people. Since the narrative of The Vegetarian is focused on human violence, vegetarianism is only a part of a wider picture, where men hit and control women, kill misbehaving dogs, fathers beat children, and hospital workers restrain those considered mad and force them to behave. It reveals the cruelties we had taken for granted.
Yeong-hye’s response to this violence against her is to become a plant: I wonder whether this was driven by an awareness that to be a human at all meant to be complicit in this violence. Even giving up meat and wearing animal products would not be enough to avoid this, as you would still be part of a patriarchal, soul-crushing society. Once you start seeing the violence everywhere, your options are limited – retreat, acceptance, or repression. In-hye attempts repression, while her sister attempts retreat, and most of the other characters are unaware of any violence at all – and in fact are usually its perpetrators.
And so Yeong-hye retreats into her vegetal state. In this she is not unlike the heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who also retreats from the world, but this time through drugs rather than a rejection of food. Yet while I didn’t have much love for Moshfegh’s novel, I quite liked The Vegetarian, even though both effectively seem to be “pro-retreat”. The difference, I think, is in the characters. The narrator in MYoR&R is basically a super-privileged person like myself whose criticisms and person seem a bit pathetic, while Yeong-hye actually seems to be in a totally hellish society with extremely limited avenues for self-expression or freedom. Hence her retreat seems more defensible.
I don’t think Han Kang actually believes that we should all become plants, either. I can tell she’s really angry about how badly Korean society treats its women. By contrast, I got the impression that Moshfegh didn’t really care about how society treated anyone. This means that The Vegetarian works as a critique even if we dismiss its apparent conclusions. And indeed, In-hye’s section is quite interesting in this regard, as she challenges herself on her own historical inaction, whether when Yeong-hye was a child being beaten by their father, or at the fateful lunch when she was force-fed by the same man. In other words, the novel doesn’t just say “do nothing, retreat” in the way that MYoR&R seems to. It says retreat is a reasonable option in the face of great suffering, but also that action is better than passivity, even if that action is merely to flee.
Not every book, I know, has to propose solutions. Chekhov believed that the writer’s goal was merely to state the question correctly. Like so many great novels of demonstrating the conflict between society and the individual, The Vegetarian shines a light on so much that is wrong yet taken for granted. If its solutions are depressing, they are only depressing in the context of the book. For you or me, the book itself is already part of a solution, raising awareness of problems we might otherwise have passed over in silence. In that sense, it’s already a greatly moral piece of art.
Congrats on the Nobel.