Madness and normality

Madness and normality are not stable opposites in The Vegetarian: the novel shows how family and medical authorities define abnormality, while the people who appear composed may be burdened by violence, guilt, or exhaustion. Yeong-hye’s refusal of ordinary expectations is treated as illness, but In-hye’s experience gradually complicates that judgment, exposing the costs of conformity and the limits of those who claim to know what recovery should look like.

Diagnosis and the family’s standard of normality

At first, Yeong-hye’s husband describes her as unremarkable and values her quietness because it asks little of him. Her unobtrusive appearance and lack of demands seem to promise an orderly marriage. When her behavior changes, he initially resists seeking medical help, telling himself there is nothing wrong and that the situation has nothing to do with him. His account establishes a gap between the quiet wife he considered suitable and the person whose choices now disrupt his expectations.

The family’s response reveals that the standard Yeong-hye is expected to meet is enforced as much through authority as through concern. Her father, a forceful former serviceman who had beaten her during her childhood, apologizes to her husband, but the family still anticipates confronting her over her refusal to eat meat. At a family gathering, he tries to make her eat; In-hye intervenes, but Yeong-hye rejects the food and takes a knife. The episode makes the conflict over her condition inseparable from coercion: what her relatives present as correction becomes another occasion on which her body and choices are overridden.

Psychiatric classification and institutional care

The medical account gives Yeong-hye’s behavior a clinical frame, but does not resolve its meaning. Her doctor explains that she has schizophrenia and is refusing food, while noting that the cause remains uncertain and the medication has not helped. He distinguishes her case from anorexia nervosa driven by a belief about weight, and tells In-hye that the hospital may need to transfer Yeong-hye to a general hospital if her condition worsens. His stated priority is preserving her life; at the same time, his explanation shows the limits of the staff’s ability to understand why she refuses to eat.

The psychiatric hospital makes care visible as a set of procedures and restrictions. Sharp or narrow objects and long cords are prohibited because patients might harm themselves or others. Patients wait for supervised access to nail clippers, and staff manage their movements and treatment. In-hye notices that she has become accustomed to these scenes; after repeated visits, streets populated by people called normal can seem stranger than the ward. The contrast unsettles the assumption that institutional patients alone are difficult to understand, even as the hospital’s rules show the real risks staff must manage.

Yeong-hye’s outward presentation does not reliably disclose her awareness. A doctor tells In-hye that her sister may seem unconscious while remaining intensely focused elsewhere; forcing her out of that state can reveal that she was awake. This distinction complicates the clinical gaze: what looks like absence may not be absence, and a patient’s stillness cannot by itself establish what she experiences. The doctor also warns that a relative’s presence might complicate care, placing family closeness in tension with the institution’s management of the patient.

In-hye’s recognition and the limits of normality

In-hye’s changing understanding begins with her sister’s admission to hospital. She had presented fear of relapse as her reason for opposing discharge, but comes to admit that Yeong-hye’s freedom from social constraints had become difficult to face. Yeong-hye seemed to have crossed a boundary that In-hye had not even recognized as a boundary, leaving In-hye feeling like a prisoner of the ordinary life she continued to maintain. The recognition shifts the question from whether Yeong-hye can return to normality to what that normality has demanded of her sister.

A childhood memory deepens that recognition. When the sisters were lost on a mountain, nine-year-old Yeong-hye suggested not going back. In-hye had urged them to find the path before dark, unable then to understand the wish to remain away. Looking back, she recognizes that Yeong-hye alone was subjected to their father’s beatings, while In-hye’s role as the eldest, dutiful daughter helped her survive by avoiding his anger. She reinterprets her apparent maturity as a survival tactic rather than simple strength. Yeong-hye’s distress, in this light, cannot be separated from the violence she absorbed while her family continued its routines.

In-hye’s own condition further unsettles the divide between patient and carer. She has endured months of insomnia and pain, largely without others knowing, and wonders whether Yeong-hye passed through a similar state before letting go of the thread connecting her to everyday life. In-hye recognizes that responsibility for her son, Ji-woo, has helped keep her attached to that thread. Her comparison does not make the sisters’ experiences identical; it shows instead how fragile the boundary can be between managing ordinary duties and being overwhelmed by suffering.

Care, control, and unresolved conflict

The novel places protective intentions beside actions that remove a person’s choice. In-hye remembers her father forcing Yeong-hye to eat and her husband, Mr. Cheong, later casting her aside after she entered psychiatric care. She also reproaches herself for not preventing what followed. At the hospital, this pattern takes another form: when Yeong-hye’s condition deteriorates, staff attempt treatment they regard as necessary to keep her alive, while In-hye struggles with the conflict between preserving her sister’s life and respecting her resistance.

The final hospital crisis leaves that conflict unresolved. During an attempt to feed Yeong-hye through a tube, In-hye breaks away from the staff and demands that they stop when she sees blood. The doctors and nurses try to manage the emergency and calm Yeong-hye. The scene does not offer a simple opposition between compassionate family and indifferent medicine: the staff are responding to a life-threatening situation, yet the treatment unfolds amid a long history of unwanted interventions. The question of what counts as care remains inseparable from who has the power to act on Yeong-hye’s body.

Across these episodes, normality appears less like a neutral measure than a social expectation maintained by family roles, institutional classifications, and everyday obligations. The novel does not make illness unreal or deny the danger of Yeong-hye’s condition. Instead, it places diagnosis beside the histories and relations that shape how others interpret her, and gives In-hye’s growing self-questioning a central role in that reassessment. What had seemed like a clear boundary between the ill and the well becomes difficult to hold: the ward contains visible crisis, while the outside world’s composure may conceal its own forms of strain and constraint.