Sometimes the most memorable fictional characters make silence their weapon of choice. In 2024 Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which first appeared in Korean in 2007 and was translated into English eight years later by Deborah Smith, silence is the weapon of choice. Kang’s novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and the writer herself was awarded the Nobel Prize this fall for what the selection committee called “… her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The Vegetarian has been banned from nearly 2500 Korean elementary, middle, and high school libraries for being “detrimental” to students. Parents complained about the graphic portrayals of sexual activity while teachers have stood close to the pride factor. Kang is the first South Korean to win the award, and attention moved to her canon as a whole, in particular The brutal silence of Yoeng-hye, the title character in The Vegetarian.
What is it about these parables that haunt us? In Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby The Scrivener,” the title character starts as a hard working employee to a man who simply and decisively refuses to continue proofreading. When asked to do his job, Bartleby decisively responds: “I would prefer not to.” In Franz Kafka’s 1922 short story “A Hunger Artist,” the title character is a professional faster. He is appreciated only to the extent that he effectively performs his job. When society has had enough of him, he is irrelevant. When asked why he doesn’t eat, he simply says he hasn’t found anything he likes to eat.
What is it about Yoeng-hye’s silence that gets to us? Maybe it’s that she wields her silence as a weapon. She refuses to compromise or explain her change of diet. Her husband narrates the first of three parts by noting that her greatest quality before becoming vegetarian was that she was unremarkable. He wasn’t even attracted to her. In her silence she forces her father, sister, and husband to ask questions. As readers we become frustrated, angry, and probably resigned to the fact that she will not budge from her ideologies. Yeong-hye has no voice in the novel save for her adamant refusal to eat meat. Her silence is the barrier between the people in her life and their full understanding of her motivations. This is her body, her choice, her destiny.
Three distinct voices narrate the story. Part I is told by her husband, part II by her brother-in-law, and part III by her sister In-hye. Much has been speculated about Kang’s intentions and motivations through the course of this narrative. Is it a commentary about the patriarchy? That’s certainly apparent in Yeong-hye’s father’s physically brutalizing and the brother-in-law’s sexually abusive relationship with Yeong-hye and her sister (his wife) In-hye. Kang’s reflections on the novel’s themes are more general:
“I feel this novel is more universal…not protesting Korean society…I just wanted to deal with human violence and the attempt to be purely innocent.”
It’s that search for innocence that lingers on the reader’s mind. This is a brief novel, less than two hundred pages. It’s a triptych of perspective and tone. There is no real plot or resolution. Yeong-hye experiences bloody, graphic dreams. In part I, she’s told that meat eating is a “fundamental human instinct” and as a result vegetarianism goes against human nature. “It’s just not natural.” In several italicized sections we do hear from Yeong-hye herself. It doesn’t fully answer any of our questions, but the images remain:
“Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible…Everything starts to feel unfamiliar…Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.”
Yeong-hye’s husband Mr. Cheong narrates part I, and we quickly see how empty he is, how dull. He expects her to fulfill her wifely duties. They commiserate about her latest dietary choice, and eventually she winds up in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. Part II is a longer examination of bodily autonomy as Yoeng-hye becomes an object of erotic obsession in the eyes of her brother-in-law, a painter and video artist. The obsession spells the downfall of his marriage and leads to further damage to Yeong-hye. In part III, Yoeng-hye’s sister In-hye has to deal with the former’s complete descent into madness and her connection to nature. She has transcended her corporeal form and believes she’s becoming a tree.
In essence, The Vegetarian is a triptych devotional exploring the relationship between obsession, dedication, fixation, creation and destruction. We are born, we die, and we take on different forms. When Yoeng-hye speaks to her sister in part III and announces “I’m not an animal anymore,” she has transcended relatively minor considerations of women in Korean society, or women in the world in general. This is the form she’s chosen for the world in which she finds herself. As her essence is stripped down so too is the language Kang uses. Her tools are obsession, lust, art and dreams and the parable context is a perfect form in which to understand the transformation, destruction, and rebirth of a human woman into a different form only great literature can evoke.
