Review: The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Rating: 4.5/5 ⭐️
Reading The Vegetarian felt less like reading a novel and more like surviving an emotional experience. When I first picked it up and saw that it was barely 190 pages long, I thought I would finish it in a couple of hours. Instead, the book demanded pauses. Every thirty or forty pages, I had to stop and process what I was feeling. It is not a book you consume quickly; it consumes you back.
And I think the only way to truly read this novel is to allow it to disturb you. I sat with this book and let it unsettle me instead of trying to immediately “understand” it.
The novel is divided into three parts, and each one feels emotionally distinct while still being tied together by repression, psychological unraveling, and the unbearable weight of silence.
The first section, narrated through the husband’s perspective, immediately unsettles you. The opening line, “ Before my wife turned vegetarian, i’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” carries such coldness and dismissal that it instantly pulls you in. You keep reading almost out of disbelief, waiting for the moment this quiet rebellion fully erupts.
This part strongly reminded me of The Metamorphosis. Like Kafka’s work, there is this sense that something incomprehensible is happening inside a person while society responds not with compassion, but with pressure, shame, and control. Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is treated not as a personal decision, but as an attack on the social order itself.
What struck me most was the way the novel exposes family structures and the entitlement parents feel over their children’s bodies and identities, even into adulthood. And through all of this, silence becomes its own character. Nobody truly listens to Yeong-hye. Nobody tries to understand her pain. Instead of helping her, they isolate her further, so much as the silence itself becomes a character.
The second part carries an entirely different emotional texture. It is probably the most misunderstood section of the novel, but to me, it has a haunting emotional depth of its own. The imagery of flowers is written so vividly that you can almost see them blooming across her body.
Yeong-hye’s desire to become more plant than person suddenly begins to make emotional sense, even if it cannot be rationally explained. The flowers seem to represent escape, transformation, and perhaps a longing to exist outside human violence altogether.
What her brother-in-law does is undeniably disturbing, but I also found myself seeing him as someone psychologically fractured in his own way. His obsession with her Mongolian mark and with turning bodies into art feels less like desire and more like collapse. Everyone in this novel seems trapped inside their own private madness, unable to truly reach one another.
And then comes the third part, which I think emotionally recontextualizes the entire novel. This section devastated me in a completely different way because it shifts the focus toward the elder sister, who may actually be one of the saddest characters in the book.
Unlike Yeong-hye, she has learned how to survive. She functions, she works, she fulfills responsibilities, and because of that, she appears “normal.” But internally, she is just as trapped. The difference is that she suppresses herself so deeply that she has convinced herself survival is the same thing as stability.
There is this heartbreaking realization that Yeong-hye took the full force of their father’s violence while the elder sister escaped some of it by becoming dependable, obedient, and responsible. Yeong-hye, became the one who absorbed the punishment, the fear, and the rebellion that the family refused to acknowledge.
What makes the elder sister so tragic is that you begin to sense she understands this. Deep down, she recognizes that she and Yeong-hye are not entirely different. The only reason she has managed to “hold herself together” is because she never allowed herself to fall apart. She is terrified of what would happen if she surrendered to her own buried thoughts and desires the way Yeong-hye did.
That realization transforms the ending into something even more painful. The novel stops being just about one woman’s psychological collapse and becomes about the different ways women survive trauma within patriarchal structures one by resisting openly, the other by internalizing everything until she becomes emotionally hollow.
This final section reminded me a lot of A Little Life in the sense that you spend the entire time internally begging the story not to go where it is clearly heading. You keep hoping someone will intervene, understand, or save her, but the tragedy unfolds anyway.
What makes the ending so powerful is that it refuses to give complete answers. The novel leaves you with questions rather than conclusions. The Vegetarian is one of those rare books that leaves you disturbed not because of what happens, but because of what it reveals about people.