The Vegetarian - Han Kang

221 pages · Paperback · Pushkin Press, November 2020

Against the Language of Choice

After finishing this book I read reviews far and wide, because it lingered. What struck me is how often The Vegetarian is read as a story about choice and freedom, when the text itself points somewhere much darker. Yeong-hye’s decision to stop eating meat is not rebellion; it marks the beginning of a mental collapse. The dreams, the food refusal, the withdrawal into silence, the fixation on becoming plant-like are not symbolic gestures of autonomy. They are markers of a psychotic break.

The language of “choice” flatters the reader. It allows the novel to be read as a parable of resistance or transcendence. The book withholds that comfort. By the final section Yeong-hye is institutionalised, malnourished, and no longer in touch with reality. Her body is failing. Her speech has almost disappeared. Han Kang does not present this as liberation. She presents it as damage.

Han Kang writes the slow erosion of a mind under sustained pressure, familial, marital, social, without dramatisation. The prose remains calm while the interior life fragments. There is no catharsis or recovery arc, and no event that corrects the trajectory. Collapse is incremental and unadorned. Violence arrives quietly, through the enforcement of normality rather than overt cruelty.

Mental illness here is not metaphorical decoration. It is experiential. Yeong-hye’s trajectory closely resembles recognised patterns of psychosis: withdrawal, disordered thinking, progressive detachment from embodied reality. Psychiatric readings of the novel have treated it as a literary case study of psychological breakdown rather than symbolic transformation, noting how accurately the symptoms are rendered and how little narrative relief is offered.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12188871/

Seen this way, patriarchy and family violence come into sharper focus rather than receding into the background. Yeong-hye is not crushed by ideology alone, but by cumulative pressure exerted on her body and mind. Her husband’s indifference, her father’s brutality, the family’s insistence on obedience; these do not provoke rebellion. They accelerate disintegration. What appears as agency is retreat.

The final section, told from her sister’s perspective, leaves no room for rescue. Yeong-hye is dying. Her sister’s helplessness mirrors the reader’s belated recognition that nothing here was chosen freely. The tragedy is not that Yeong-hye rejected society, but that the only exit available to her involved the erasure of self.

Some criticism continues to misread vegetarianism in the novel as ethical resistance or an eco-political stance. That reading is partial, and it carries a cost. It risks aestheticising illness. Trauma-focused criticism situates bodily refusal as symptom rather than strategy, showing how suffering is misread when it is forced into the language of meaning or protest.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391894966_Beyond_The_Platter_Unpacking_Trauma_Resistance_and_Healing_in_Han_Kang%27s_The_Vegetarian

The Vegetarian does not convert suffering into insight. Awareness does not heal. Silence does not purify. Withdrawal does not protect. Yeong-hye’s transformation offers no revelation and no redemption. It only narrows the space in which she can exist.

This is not a novel about freedom. It is a novel about what happens when the self collapses under the weight of being endlessly managed, corrected and consumed.

Few novels unsettle as persistently as this one.