Sanford Moxley

Those left in the wake of suicide blindly try to put the puzzle pieces together – left, helplessly, to imagine that whatever the pain the victim of suicide held, it was too great to bear, too immovable to solve.  Then there are those final moments we can’t understand and don’t want to consider, where any attempt to do so is met with soul crushing pressure of a deep-water dive.  Consequently, it is nothing short of terror that courses through a reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Hogarth) as we helplessly watch the quiet unraveling of a human being, a suicide in slow motion.  

Staring into a mirror where little light is shown creates an eerie thirst for more, while too great a light and one is forced to look away. Kang masterfully reflects both on the reader, as we painfully absorb the silent and lonely cries for help from our protagonist while simultaneously searching for answers and solution. At the center of this story are two sisters who, initially seem almost opposite, ultimately find themselves on the same path – under the weight of remaining obedient and steadfast in the face of sociopathic cruelty. The demise for one sister, Yeong-hye, is complete.  Her suffering begins inwardly building in childhood through physical and verbal abuse from her father (both on her and on animals she witnessed) and remains buried and hidden until the pressure can no longer be withstood amidst the quiet servitude of her sniveling self-involved husband and the blindly selfish pursuits from her brother-in-law.

The construct of Kang’s world in The Vegetarian is one of transparent, unapologetic lessness for Yeong-hye and her sister.  Less in their place in the world, less in respect for their well-being, less in minding any care to mental or physical struggle.  Yeong-hye’s downward spiral starts with a troubling dream triggering her to stop eating meat, which sets off an initially comedic level of disregard for her by her husband.  We can almost laugh at his piddling melodramatic complaints, whose dinner with his boss is “ruined” by his wife’s changed diet.  Severity increases culminating with her husband pausing to ensure he has the appropriate shoes on before taking her to the hospital after slitting her wrists in a last-ditch rebellion during a family gathering.

Angry desperation at the absence of any useful attempts to understand what is happening to Yeong-hye, morphs into devastation as we realize that there is no saving her.  The ceaseless ignorance by those surrounding her take on caricatures of society rather than individual human beings.  Purposefully or not, Kang’s vaguely developed characters convey a general oppression by the world she inhabits rather than specific bad actors. At first, we scream at their dimensionless approach to Yeong-hye but ultimately succumb to what they represent.  Accordingly, her all-encompassing pain and subjugation is remedied not through the rejection of individuals, but abandonment of her humanity.  Yeong-hye’s journey ends in psychotic transformation to a tree, climaxing in her ingesting water as her only sustenance cementing the slow release of a life lived in constant suffering.

I believe that a fundamental purpose of a piece of fiction, from the perspective of the reader, is how your relationship to the material makes you think and feel.  And if these interactions are deep and powerful, you leave with greater empathy for and curiosity of the people and the world around you.  And it is in vein that Han Kang has massively succeeded in The Vegetarian, or put more accurately, Kang’s carefully crafted world provided the blueprints for me, and many others, to succeed.