Summary And Analysis Of "The Vegetarian" By Han Kang

When reading “The Vegetarian” it leaves its reader with a powerful feeling of perturbation. As it becomes transparent from the title of the book, the plot is focused on a woman who turns vegetarian. However, this story has nothing to do with dieting or healthy eating, the story is more about people’s selfishness and misunderstandings. Throughout the whole story, the thing that cling to me was in life there will never be a time where someone will truly understand you but only abandon you. Yeong-hye met her demise due to her husband, brother in law and sister.

In the first chapter it starts off with Mr. Cheong seeking a woman who would be unassertive and bland. That’s when he laid eyes on Yeong-hye and she did not disappoint. He had options to get with someone more attractive, but if he did that he would always be pressured to look like a male model. Yeong-hye was very low maintenance, and never really asked much from Mr. Cheong. On Book TV Now interviewed Han Kang and she stated “Some people say she is very passive or too weak. But I don't think so. I think she is a very determined and strong person. Very persevering. She doesn't have her own voice. She is observed as an object.” However, everything changes when Yeong-hye had a dreadful nightmare which affected her significantly to the point she rejected eating meat. The following morning Mr. Cheong wakes up late due to Yeong-hye failing to wake him, and when he goes to the kitchen he sees her throwing away all kinds of meat into a black garbage bag. He asked what she was doing, and she replies “I had a dream”, but he was in a hurry to get to work and he didn’t have the time to deal with it. Yeong-hye mental state only becomes unstable as time passes. Mr. Cheong can no longer bear it no more and causes him to do an intervention. At the intervention her father hits her and attempts to force pork in her mouth. This bothers Yeong-hye so deeply that she seizes the knife from the table and tries to commit suicide by slicing her wrists. It is later revealed that Mr. Cheong has made preparations for divorce. Rather than him trying to understand her, he instead gave up on her. He had the option to support her and tried to help. Knowing and seeing her health deteriorating in front of him he didn’t try to fight for her. He could have done research to see what and how much she needed to consume in order to be healthy. He told her family knowing the tension that there was between them. Frankly, he did this so he could get out of this relationship on a clean streak and not look like the bad guy.

The second chapter starts off with the point of view of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law in which his name is not mention in the story. He is a video artist, and he was more attracted to Yeong-hye’s than his own wife. Everything that he wished in his wife was in Yeong-hye. Yeong-hye became independent and was living on her own. Meanwhile, the Yeong-hye’s brother in law becomes increasingly obsessed with Yeong-hye, and specifically with her birthmark on her buttocks when his wife mentions it to him. He uses that obsession to put it in his art videos, first into a variety of sketches that depicted Yeong-hye and an unknown individual covered with flowers and having sexual intercourse, and then in a video recordings that he gets Yeong-hye accepted to contribute to. In the first recording he is covering Yeong-hye’s naked body with paintings of beautiful flowers. In the second recording, he records him painting on a male body. This he asked if she still had the flowers on her body, she answers yes due to the reason she confessed to him that the flowers stopped the night terrors. Then he tries to make his the sexual sketches become a reality which ends in failure. Then he has his body painted by yet another individual and then goes to Yeong-hye’s residence, and records himself having passionate sex with Yeong-hye but it becomes broken up by the arrival of In-hye. In her seeing this it stirs up a conflict which leads In-hye taking Yeong-hye to a psychiatric hospital. The London Magazine states in article The Vegetarian by Han Kang States “She is a cook first, an object for sex second, a companion? Hardly.” Let’s be reminded that this is the man that knew what she had been through, and at the end of the day he didn’t care due to being blind to selfishness and obsession. He was so self-centered to the point that he did this all behind his wife’s back knowing he could lose everything which happened. The only thing he cared about was his art and he knew that his flowers help Yeong-hye but failed her just like Yeong-hye husband failed her to.

The final chapter takes place three years ahead and it starts with Yeong-hye who is now in a psychiatric hospital; Yeong-hye does have her parent’s visits her, but all that she knows of them are the comments of why she isn’t like her sister, and the constant pressure of being forced to walk in her sister shoes. Sadly, they give up on her and abandon her. At this point, Yeong-hye rejects all food and doesn’t want any part of it which leads In-hye to feel hopeless with her sister due to seeing her starving to death. In-hye does experiences her own emotional disaster when she gets hit by a recurring dream. She wasn’t the only one that had this dream, her husband also had the same dream. In the dream they all experience hallucinations in which each of them see their own reflections distorted and their faces reformed. This was a familiar but distorted image, that Yeong-hye was the only one that accepts it and capitulates to this broken image. She was no longer able to handle all that her sister reminded her of. She was unable to forgive her for crossing a boundary that she herself couldn’t overcome, and was unable to forgive her sister, she leaves her behind.

Yeong-hye seen herself in a different light in which no one ever came close to understand. She saw thing outside the box and was not confined to the pin hole that society or her family saw through. She had an obsession for freedom and to understood that pushed her to of point of madness that destroy her. She was her own understanding, demise, freedom and saviors. Regardless of her struggling to walk in a straight line, down in the dirt with a landslide of death approaching, she fulfilled her light. She faces the odds against her and run head on into the fear she ran from. One thing is for certain, we will never get her part of the story and she will never be understood!