The Vegetarian

by Han Kang

it was nothing but sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband’s wishes as mine had done.

God forbid she’s a human first

This strange situation had nothing to do with me.

Uh huh.

How can that child be so defiant? To think that a daughter of ours…”

You’re a terrible mother.

Intolerable loathing, so long suppressed. Loathing I’ve always tried to mask with affection. But now the mask is coming off.

I interpret this as her coming to terms with everything in her life, her past, and wanting to have control over her future.

Everything starts to feel unfamiliar. As if I’ve come up to the back of something. Shut up behind a door without a handle. Perhaps I’m only now coming face-to-face with the thing that has always been here. It’s dark. Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.

The trauma: the blind eye, the turned cheek

She put up a surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while,

I hate you.

I become a different person, a different person rises up inside me, devours me, those hours…

The body keeps score

Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening—what I am going to gouge?

She doesn’t want to perpetuate the cycle

“Sister, just behave, okay? Just eat what he gives you.” “Father, I beg you, stop this,” In-hye entreated him, but he shook her off and thrust the pork at my wife’s lips.

This fucking man. In-hye, the only one who ever cared

But my wife merely gazed at the sobbing woman as though she were a complete stranger, and eventually, as if having decided that this performance had gone on quite long enough, got back up onto the bed.

As she should.

One time, just one more time, I want to shout. I want to throw myself through the pitch-black window. Maybe that would finally get this lump out of my body. Yes, perhaps that might work. Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.

Finally finding autonomy in any way she can

A bird, which had been crushed in her grip, tumbled to the bench.

-This I never really figured out-

All those scenes of flight he’d included in his videos; and yet, when he needed it most, such flight had proved beyond him.

WEAK MAN.

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

She endured, and when she finally found agency, it was met as rebellion. Her final act: deciding her own fate.