The Vegetarian: Chapter 3: Flaming Trees Summary & Analysis

The final section is narrated by In-hye. Two years later, In-hye is traveling to the psychiatric hospital where Yeong-hye now lives. A few months earlier, Yeong-hye had gone missing during the hour in which patients are allowed to take walks. The staff had scoured the nearby mountains, and one nurse was able to find Yeong-hye in an isolated spot deep in the woods, standing “stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees.” 

In-hye had been taking care of Ji-woo all day, as he had been running a fever for three days. At night, after receiving the call that Yeong-hye had been found, In-hye continues to care for him, holding a wet cloth to his forehead all night. As she does so, she has a vision of Yeong-hye drenched in rain, standing among the trees. When she finally feels Ji-woo’s forehead has cooled, she curls up on the couch to sleep. She dreams of Yeong-hye doing a handstand, imagining that leaves are growing out of her body and roots are growing out of her hands.

The narrative flashes forward to In-hye walking from the bus stop to the psychiatric hospital. As she walks, In-hye thinks about her sister growing up. Yeong-hye had grown more and more reserved as she grew; In-hye even thinks that “there were times when she seemed like a total stranger.” She thinks, too, that this had been true of her husband: “in certain respects they were both baffling to her in exactly the same way.” She wonders if she had ever truly understood her husband.

In-hye recalls the day she first met her husband. He had come into her shop, completely worn out and looking for shaving lotion. She was drawn to his defenselessness and asked him to lunch. She had wanted to take care of him, but even after they were married she found that he was perpetually worn out. She was never sure of the source of her affection for him, and was never sure of his feelings for her.

In-hye found over their marriage that her husband respected her and was kind, but that his true love was reserved for his artwork. Once, after Ji-woo’s first birthday, he  filmed Ji-woo just beginning to walk and had an idea for a film: creating an animation in which butterflies flew from Ji-woo’s every footstep. But the video never became a reality. In-hye’s husband was so dedicated to his own work that Ji-woo rarely saw him, so much so that Ji-woo often asked if there was a dad in the family. After the incident with Yeong-hye, In-hye would tell him there was not.

In-hye arrives at the hospital, noticing an old tree in the front garden that glinted on sunny days. She closes her eyes and sees Yeong-hye’s face overlaid on the tree as she waits for the doctor to meet her. She is rarely able to sleep, and sometimes goes into the bathroom and sits in the bathtub with her clothes on, as her husband once had. Feeling the coziness of the tub, she thinks that he might not have been so incomprehensible after all.

In-hye thinks of how everything fell apart after Yeong-hye became a vegetarian, and what she could have done to prevent everything from dissolving: she should have stopped her father from force-feeding Yeong-hye, or picked up the fruit knife, or dissuaded Mr. Cheong from casting Yeong-hye aside, or prevented her husband from taking advantage of her. She thinks that what her husband had done was unforgiveable.

In-hye recalls the day she found her husband and Yeong-hye. Paramedics had gotten Yeong-hye into a straitjacket while she struggled, biting them. Her husband had tried to throw himself over the railing, but a paramedic had gotten hold of him. As he was being dragged away, she saw not lust nor insanity in his eyes, but terror—just as In-hye was feeling.

In-hye’s husband had been held in a police cell after the hospital confirmed he wasn’t mentally ill. He experienced several months of lawsuits and inquiries, and then went into hiding. In-hye never saw him again. Yeong-hye had been sent back to a mental hospital. She refused to eat meat, and often pressed herself up against the window on sunny days to bare her breasts to the sun. None of the other members of her family made any further effort for Yeong-hye and even severed contact with In-hye. But she couldn’t abandon Yeong-hye.

A doctor approaches In-hye and brings her to a consulting room. He tells her that Yeong-hye’s is still refusing to eat, and explains that they will try to feed her intravenously. If it doesn’t work, she will be transferred to a critical ward. In-hye asks to see her sister to try to reason with her. The doctor agrees to give her thirty minutes, but reiterates that 15-20% of anorexic patients starve to death. He tells her they still don’t fully understand why she is refusing to eat, and none of the medicines they’ve given her are having any effect.

In-hye walks to Yeong-hye’s room. She remembers the first time she brought Yeong-hye to the ward. Yeong-hye had been moved from another hospital, and In-hye worried that returning to social life would lead to a relapse for Yeong-hye. In-hye had also been upset with Yeong-hye, as she had been able to “shuck off social constraints,” while In-hye had to remain responsible.

Yeong-hye had been in favor of coming to the psychiatric ward, and when she visited the ward for the first time, she had been excited by the trees all around the ward and remarked to In-hye that “all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters.” Now, as the nurse guides In-hye to Yeong-hye’s room, the nurse says that Yeong-hye continues to try to pull out the IV, and so they have to use a tranquilizer on her.

In-hye remembers another incident when she had visited Yeong-hye, and found her sister doing a handstand. A nurse told her she’d been doing so for 30 minutes already. In-hye had had to push her sister over to get her to talk, and when she showed her the food she’d brought, Yeong-hye had said that she didn’t need to eat anymore, she only needs water, not food. She also tells her sister that in a dream, she discovered that trees stand upside-down, with their arms in the earth.

In the present, In-hye approaches Yeong-hye’s room. She sees another patient, Hee-joo, on the way. Hee-joo is receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania, and she had helped take care of Yeong-hye in the hospital. Hee-joo tells In-hye that Yeong-hye has been vomiting blood, and her stomach acid is eating away at her stomach. She worries that Yeong-hye might die.

In-hye approaches Yeong-hye, who is completely emaciated and looks like an “overgrown child,” having lost so much weight. In-hye finds burst veins on Yeong-hye everywhere, meaning that they have no place left to put an IV in. The only other option requires a dangerous surgical operation that would connect the IV to her arteries. They’ve tried to insert a tube into her nose, but Yeong-hye has resisted this method. They will try this one last time today, but if this fails, then Yeong-hye will be transferred to another hospital.

After Yeong-hye had been found in the forest, In-hye met with her doctor, who told her that Yeong-hye had become dehydrated and refused to take medicine. When In-hye asked her sister about this, Yeong-hye tells her that she is “not an animal anymore,” and that all she needs is sunlight. In-hye asks Yeong-hye if she really thinks she’s become a tree, and asks how a tree could talk. Yeong-hye smiles and agrees, saying soon her thoughts and words will disappear.

In-hye brings food to Yeong-hye. She wants to convince her to eat, but Yeong-hye appears to be asleep. In-hye recalls another visit, in which Yeong-hye asks her sister to try to get her out of the hospital, saying that people are always telling her to eat, but she doesn’t like eating. She explains that the day before, after she ate, they gave her an injection to put her to sleep. In-hye tells Yeong-hye that she can help her get out if she promises to eat. Yeong-hye says that In-hye is the same as the doctors: they don’t try to understand her, they just “force [her] to take medication, and stab [her] with needles.” In-hye says that she is only afraid that Yeong-hye is going to die. Yeong-hye asks if it’s such a bad thing to die.

In-hye thinks back to when she and Yeong-hye had gotten lost on a mountain as children, and Yeong-hye suggested they not go back to their family. In-hye had been relieved when she navigated them home, but Yeong-hye had not been. In-hye realizes, looking back, that Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings, which is why she had been so hesitant to return to their home.

In-hye continues to consider what she could have done to prevent all of this from happening. She wonders again about her ex-husband, who has only called her once (around nine months ago) since they split, asking to see Ji-woo. She hung up on him and then uttered the words “I don’t know you.” She unplugged the phone, and after that, he never called again.

Back in the present, In-hye watches Yeong-hye sleeping and thinks about how Yeong-hye told her that she went to the forest because she heard someone calling her, and she stood there waiting for them. In-hye is jolted out of her memories by Hee-joo, who tells her that the doctors are saying Yeong-hye might die.

There is one memory In-hye has never told anyone. It had happened two years earlier, in the spring of the  year when her husband had made the video of Yeong-hye. In-hye had bled from her vagina for close to a month. She was afraid of going to the hospital, worried that she had a serious disease. She became aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband, devoid of happiness. She realized that she  had never really lived.

When In-hye finally worked up the courage to go to the doctor, he removed a polyp stuck to her vaginal wall—nothing else was wrong with her, and the bleeding would stop in a few days. She was stunned that she had spent so much time worrying over so little. On the train platform heading home, she worried that she might throw herself in front of the train. As the next few months passed, she felt that wound drawing her back to madness.

After that summer had past, one night In-hye’s husband arrived in In-hye’s bed in the middle of the night after several days away and drew her close to him, telling her to “put up with” sex for a minute. She managed to put up with it, but felt both pain and shame afterward. As she walked around her apartment after her husband had fallen asleep, she felt that life was meaningless, and that she couldn’t go on. She left the apartment and walked toward the dark mountains in the distance.

Back in the present, time passes of In-hye’s 30 minutes, but Yeong-hye is still asleep. In-hye finally admits that Yeong-hye is actually insane. She wonders if she herself is on the same path that Yeong-hye took to madness, as she is now in the grip of deep pain and insomnia. She thinks that if it were not for Ji-woo, she might have gone mad as well. He is the only thing that can make her laugh, and when he sees that he makes her happy, he tries even more to please her. But when she is alone, she imagines Yeong-hye, the forest, and the trees, wishing that they would call to her and “take her life from her.”

In-hye’s 30 minutes is up, so she packs up the food that she brought for Yeong-hye. In-hye sees the doctor and tells him that it didn’t seem like Yeong-hye was conscious. The doctor assures her that Yeong-hye is conscious, just so concentrated that she isn’t aware of her surroundings. The doctor tells In-hye that they are going to try to feed Yeong-hye through her nose, and tells In-hye that if it’s too much for her, she should step out of the room.

As Yeong-hye is carried into another ward, she thrashes wildly. In-hye is made to step out of the room, as a nurse tells her that Yeong-hye will be calmer without In-hye in there. In-hye watches from outside as the doctor tries to insert a tube into Yeong-hye’s nose as the carers hold her still. Yeong-hye opens her mouth as wide as possible, closing her gullet so that the tube cannot go in. They  try a second time, this time successfully. They start to send gruel through the tube, then get out a syringe to tranquilize Yeong-hye.

In-hye shakes off the nurse outside and runs into the room, but a carer grabs her to stop her from acting. Yeong-hye shrieks and shakes her head so violently that blood gushes out of the tube and Yeong-hye’s mouth. The head nurse goes to tranquilize Yeong-hye,  and In-hye bites the carer and begs them to stop as Yeong-hye vomits blood and convulses.

The doctor tells In-hye that they need to transfer Yeong-hye to the main hospital to keep her alive. In-hye runs to the bathroom and vomits. She washes her face, thinking, “It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like.” She looks at her face in the mirror and does not recognize herself. She is steeped in guilt, having admitted Yeong-hye to this ward.

In-hye and Yeong-hye sit in the ambulance. In-hye  brushes Yeong-hye’s hair with her fingers, which reminds her of Ji-woo. In-hye phones her neighbor and asks if she can watch Ji-woo. In-hye remembers how a long time ago, Ji-woo had told In-hye about a nightmare he’d had in which a white bird had told him that she was his mother as it flew away. He sobbed into her, upset. She tried to placate him, telling him that she was right there with him, and she had not changed into a white bird. But she still worries about his dream, as that had been the morning that she had climbed up the mountain away from him before deciding to retrace her steps and return.

In-hye assures herself, sitting in the ambulance, that it had just been a dream. But she feels guilty that even for a moment, she had thought to abandon Ji-woo. She wonders if her husband and Yeong-hye had not “smashed through all the boundaries,” that perhaps she might have been the one to break down.

Yeong-hye opens her eyes, but says nothing. In-hye says to Yeong-hye, “Perhaps this is all a kind of  dream.” She admits that she has dreams, too, but says, “surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we?” She looks out the ambulance window, where the trees are glinting in the sunlight. She looks at them “As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something.”