BOOKS & MORE BOOKS - THE VEGETARIAN BY HAN KANG: THE IMPOSSIBLE ESCAPE

 

Some novels leave us with a clear opinion.

Others leave us disturbed, fascinated and uncertain about what, exactly, we have just experienced.

The Vegetarian belongs to the second category.

I closed Han Kang's novel with the uncomfortable feeling that I still did not know how to judge it. It is not an easy or comforting read. Its images are often disturbing, its violence difficult to endure, and its central character seems to move further and further away from any possibility of returning to ordinary life.

And yet, I found myself deeply moved by it.

There are books that remind us why we read: books in which words create a world so vivid and psychologically intense that, for the duration of the reading, it seems almost real.

The Vegetarian is one of those books.

A woman seen from the outside

Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat after a series of disturbing dreams.

The decision appears simple. The consequences are not.

Her husband, a mediocre and emotionally detached man, is bewildered by the change. He values his wife precisely because she is ordinary, submissive and undemanding. When she stops conforming to his expectations, the fragile structure of their marriage begins to collapse.

Her family responds with even greater violence. Later, her brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her body and turns her into the object of an artistic and erotic fantasy. In the final part of the novel, her sister In-hye becomes the closest observer of Yeong-hye's gradual withdrawal from the human world.

The novel is divided into three parts, and Yeong-hye is always seen through the eyes of someone else.

We are never truly inside her mind.

The only access we have to her interior world comes through her dreams. This is one of Han Kang's most unsettling choices. Everyone around Yeong-hye interprets her: her husband tries to explain her, her father attempts to control her, her brother-in-law projects his desires onto her, and doctors diagnose her.

But Yeong-hye herself remains largely inaccessible.

She is constantly being looked at, described and acted upon, yet she is never fully possessed by the narrative. Perhaps this is one of the novel's most powerful paradoxes: a woman whose body becomes the centre of everyone else's attention is also the character we are least able to reach.

When resistance becomes disappearance

At the beginning, Yeong-hye's refusal to eat meat can be understood as an act of resistance. She rejects violence and, perhaps, the entire system of expectations that has shaped her life. Her body becomes the first place where she can say no.

But the novel does not present this resistance as a simple path towards liberation.

In literature, madness can sometimes become a form of freedom. By stepping outside social conventions and abandoning imposed roles, characters may escape the masks they have been forced to wear.

Yeong-hye's journey is different.

She does not become free by escaping the human world.

She gradually disappears from it.

Her desire to become a plant can be understood. Human beings, in her vision, are violent creatures. Nature, by contrast, seems innocent. A tree does not attack or impose its will upon another being. It simply exists.

Yeong-hye wants to become something that cannot participate in human violence.

But the price of this escape is the destruction of her own body.

This is why I could not see her madness as liberation. I could understand the desire to escape, and why becoming a plant might appear to her as the only possible form of purity. But I could not call what happens to her freedom.

I could only see a human being disappearing, piece by piece, until resistance itself becomes another form of self-destruction.

Two sisters, one desire to disappear

For me, In-hye is the emotional centre of the final part of the novel.

She is the sister who continues to live in the human world. She works, looks after her child and carries the responsibilities expected of her. And yet, when she looks at Yeong-hye, she begins to recognise something that frightens her.

At one point, she tells her sister:

I have dreams too, you know? Dreams in which I could dissolve, let them take over me... But we cannot live only in dreams, can we? We have to wake up at some point, don't we? Why... why then...?

The unfinished question is devastating.

Because In-hye is not simply speaking to Yeong-hye.

She is also speaking to herself.

The difference between the sisters may not be that one wants to escape and the other does not. Perhaps In-hye is simply the one who has learned to continue living while carrying the same desire within herself.

Yeong-hye surrenders to the dream.

In-hye continues to resist it.

Neither sister is truly free.

This is one of the reasons I found the novel so infuriating. The helplessness of both women is almost unbearable. They live in a patriarchal society still rooted in rigid convictions, a society that leaves them little space in which to exist on their own terms. When a woman refuses the role assigned to her, the response is not curiosity or understanding.

It is control.

The tree as refuge and defeat

Yeong-hye's transformation into a plant is one of the novel's most powerful images.

Nature becomes a refuge from human violence. The tree represents silence, stillness and a form of existence untouched by the cruelty Yeong-hye associates with humanity.

But Han Kang does not allow this image to become reassuring.

The tree is both refuge and defeat.

It represents the possibility of escaping the human world, but also the disappearance of the human self. Yeong-hye wants to become a tree because trees do not harm anyone. But to become one, she must destroy the body that has carried her through the world.

The dream of absolute purity becomes inseparable from annihilation.

What happens when the world becomes so violent that the only imaginable escape is to stop being human?

Han Kang's world of trauma and nature

Having also read The Greek Lessons and I Do Not Say Goodbye, I cannot help noticing a deeper connection between the three Han Kang novels I have encountered.

Their stories are very different, but beneath them I sense a common impulse: when the human world becomes unbearable, her characters search for some alternative space in which the wounded self might survive.

In The Greek Lessons, a language becomes a fragile refuge.

In I Do Not Say Goodbye, nature becomes a witness to history and a keeper of memory.

In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye seeks refuge in nature by attempting to become part of it.

But none of these refuges offers a simple escape.

Perhaps that is what makes Han Kang's novels so powerful. She does not offer the comforting idea that nature can heal everything, or that rejecting society automatically leads to freedom.

Final thoughts

I still find it difficult to say exactly what I think of The Vegetarian.

It is not a book I would describe as enjoyable, nor one I would recommend to someone looking for a reassuring reading experience.

But it is a book I cannot dismiss.

Its images remain with me. Its questions remain unanswered. And its central tragedy continues to trouble me.

I understand why Yeong-hye wants to escape. I understand why the world around her makes that desire comprehensible.

But I cannot call her transformation liberation.

I see instead a human being trying to escape violence by abandoning the very body and identity through which she has experienced the world.

And beside her stands In-hye, the sister who continues to live, but who knows that the desire to disappear is not entirely foreign to her either.

Perhaps this is what affected me most deeply.

Not the idea that madness can free us from conventions, but the possibility that, for some people, the world can become so oppressive that freedom itself begins to resemble disappearance.

When I closed the book, I was left with no clear judgement.

Only a disturbing question:

What do we do when the world we are expected to live in is the very world that is destroying us?

I don't know whether The Vegetarian offers an answer.

Perhaps it is not meant to.

What I do know is that Han Kang has created a novel of extraordinary visual and psychological intensity, one that continues to live in the mind long after the last page.

And once again, I found myself in awe of the quiet miracle of literature: the strange magic of words capable of creating worlds that, for a while, feel real.