“Verily, hardship is followed by ease.”
-Quran 94:6
Fiction is valued for its magnificent ability to portray lived ideologies in metaphorical form. Such portrayals are assessed, positively or negatively, according to how persuasively their metaphors are developed and sustained. Recently, I happened to choose a work that struck me as a generative metaphor. South Korean writer Han Kang’s novella The Vegetarian, which received the International Booker Prize in 2016, offers a compelling example of fiction’s ability to translate social formations.
The plot focuses on Yeong-hye, an ostensibly ordinary Korean woman who abruptly refuses meat, and on the ensuing reactions that reorganise her relationships and social standing.
While many critical readings foreground the structural violence that encloses Yeong-hye, along with the patriarchal forces that silence her inner suffering and desire, I was particularly drawn to the novella’s narrative technique. The text is arranged into three sections, each told through a different perspective on Yeong-hye: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. This design intensifies Yeong-hye’s erasure. Even after completing the novella, the reader remains marked by an unresolved hunger to apprehend Yeong-hye’s identity from her own vantage point, a deprivation that formally enacts the very silencing the story interrogates.
Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat emerges in relation to recurrent dreams that rupture the ordinary life she once lived. In sleep, she is disturbed by images that cast her as culpable, even monstrous, for consuming meat, or more precisely, for participating in a carnivorous order. For instance, she sees herself spitting blood, strangling a dog, and devouring it. These visions precipitate her demand for change, and this demand is what drives the plot. Within the social world the novella depicts, vegetarianism reads as a rejection of cultural normalcy. It is construed as antisocial, aberrant, and threatening. Yeong-hye’s husband interprets her refusal as “abnormal,” and as an affront to his patriarchal authority. Her parents, particularly her father, treat her disobedience as disgraceful and scandalous. In this sense, “becoming a vegetarian” operates as an organising metaphor through which the novella critiques traditional, patriarchal, and authoritative culture of South Korea. Yeong-hye is in search of a new life beyond this world, searching for the meaning of life unconstrained by these forces. Yet precisely because her desire exceeds what the culture can assimilate, she is repeatedly named “abnormal.” Like the narration that withholds her interiority, the novella presents identity as unstable and in formation, overwritten by others who challenge her.
Though we contemplate such ‘self-reclamatory’ writings, we are unconsciously driven deeply into the abyss of pessimism. The never-ending hope, ironically, itself turns into a never-attaining pessimistic ending. While postmodern literature celebrates its reclaiming of literature through self-portrayal of reality, it most often ends up turning those fictional works into dystopian realities. If this imaginative pattern persists, the long-term consequence may be a further erosion of collective confidence in the possibility of an otherwise.
My analysis therefore turns to the novella’s dystopian tendencies, not to dismiss them, but to consider what they reveal about contemporary narrative habits.
The Postmodern Dystopian Prism
The Vegetarian opens with what Yeong-hye’s husband frames as a disruption of domestic “peace.” From the outset, the narration unsettles the reader through this disturbance and solicits a desire to locate its cause. Such openings often structure postmodern fiction: it constructs a self within the disturbances and disruptions, and showcases before us the expected future that is to be experienced. Even when the narrative impulse is animated by hope, it frequently gravitates toward a pessimistic terminus that resembles dystopian fiction.
Dystopian fiction can be defined as an expected future organised through systematic oppression and suppression, the opposite of a utopia. The popularity of dystopian narratives may indicate a cultural imagination increasingly oriented toward disorientation and doom. The World Wars and the Cold War left frightening forms of collective fear, now in the present, readers are asked to confront the trauma of imagined futures as well. Ideally, that confrontation might be transformed into ethical growth and a more developed social world. When George Orwell articulates doublethink as “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,” might, at first glance, seem bleak. But in other terms, this line affirms fiction’s power to cultivate the mind toward a world that does not replicate structural violence. Even if such a world is, for the time being, a “carefully constructed lie,” it may function as a necessary rehearsal for ethical possibility. It may also be interpreted as the psychic pursuit of safety and moral clarity when those conditions are materially unavailable.
In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye attempts to form an identity that is more truthful to herself, and this truthfulness entails a kind of escape from oppression. The novella repeatedly draws her back into the distorting reality she seeks to exit. The implication is that Yeong-hye’s social world systematically obstructs self-definition. The logic of dystopian fiction becomes visible where hope is relentlessly disrupted by the very structures the protagonist confronts. The reader therefore comes to anticipate an environment that is not simply unhappy, but structurally hostile to human flourishing.
Suppression, oppression, attack, submergence, trauma, and death become the dominant vocabulary through which the future is imagined. The more one hopes, the more one suffers. The result can be a pervasive exhaustion that suggests people may need to read differently rather than simply read more. The imaginative task for a new world is to construct “lies” that are not manipulative, but hopeful, compelling, and inspiring, narratives that open a credible path toward dignity.
Reimagining Catharsis
To rethink the possibilities of fiction, one must consider the creation of new forms within inherited prisms. If the prevailing prism is named “postmodern,” the challenge is to pierce it and to move from perpetual disturbance toward more ordered imaginative worlds. Fiction must attempt to create such worlds, particularly when they remain difficult to realise in contemporary life.
A compelling point of departure appears in the Qur’anic verse: “Verily, hardship is followed by ease.” The verse calls its readers to transform hardship into ease by insisting on the intelligibility of hope. Hope does not “fall,” and tragic realities do not disappear, yet human beings persist through hope even as they are threatened by struggle. Read alongside postmodern dystopian tendencies, the Qur’anic assurance compels a reconsideration of what lies beyond the postmodern prism. It gestures toward imaginative work that does not merely diagnose oppression, but also dares to envision its aftermath.
Readers are often drawn to fiction that is daring, inspiring, and thought-provoking. A renewed worldview could reshape fictional production into something that remains worth dreaming about, so that reading becomes an encounter with a different reality, even while one remains physically enclosed within present injustices. A growing number of readers appears weary of the postmodern prism because stagnation offers little imaginative refuge. Human beings know they wish to transcend the given world, to experience futures not yet foreclosed, and to meet characters who do not simply mirror the familiar. Maybe familiarity is regarded as the key to aesthetics, but for me, it never applies in the art of fictional writing; it is like exploring the world in a new perspective different from the existing.
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Nihal Ibrahim
He is a student of Civilizational Studies and Classical English Literature in Kerala, India. He is also pursuing traditional Islamic learning alongside his academic studies. His interests include Literature, Philosophy, Theology, and exploring the intersection of literature and theology, with a focus on articulating Islam through fiction and poetry even more beautifully.
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