Internaonal Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences Vol-10, Issue-4; Jul-Aug, 2025 Peer-Reviewed Journal Journal Home Page Available: hps://ijels.com/ Journal DOI: 10.22161/ijels IJELS-2025, 10(4), (ISSN: 2456-7620) (Int. J of Eng. Lit. and Soc. Sci.) hps://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.104.10 54 Ethics of Witnessing: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian Antara Datta Associate Professor, Department of English, Janki Devi memorial College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India Received: 29 May 2025; Received in revised form: 27 Jun 2025; Accepted: 03 Jul 2025; Available online: 07 Jul 2025 ©2025 The Author(s). Published by Infogain Publication. This is an open-access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Abstract— The paper examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian as a critique of militarized masculinities, extractivism, and systemic violence. The Vegetarian exposes the limitations of conventional liberalism by problematizing the concept of the ‘human’. It argues that The Vegetarian reveals how South Korea’s militarized history and capitalist culture and economy are entangled with patriarchy and extractivism. The paper shows how the novel interrogates anthropocentric and gendered epistemologies and different forms of violence. It also suggests that it is perhaps through empathetic witnessing and ethical engagement that the novel opens up the possibility of hope. Keywords— Militarized masculinities, patriarchy, metamorphosis, humanness, sexualized bodies. In a significant departure from its historically Eurocentric and predominantly White Male tradition, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024. As the world remains a helpless witness to the now more than a year-long and continuing genocide in Gaza—with consistent military support and rhetorical vindication of Israel’s “right to self-defence” by the most powerful Western democratic nations—dehumanizing statements like Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s remark, “We are fighting against animals,” have intensified the erosion of the already fragile concept of humanity. The calculated annihilation of Palestinian civilians, predominantly women and children, through bombings, starvation, and displacement, has only deepened the global crisis of moral corrosion. After winning the Nobel, Han refused to celebrate the award reportedly because of the two raging wars in Ukraine and Gaza. A year which was marked by unremitting violence and brutal attempts to silence resistance, Han Kang’s Nobel award, is a recognition of her excavation and scathing critique of violence and her insistent exploration of the concept, contours and complexity of the idea of the “human”. In a conversation with Krys Lee on “Violence and Being Human”, Han recalls her childhood in Gwangju made infamous by Gwangju Massacre, the May 18 Democratic Uprising, when many citizens, including Jeonnam University students, were beaten and killed by government troops in the protest against the Chun Doo Hwan regime in 1980. The historical memories of this uprising and its traumatic aftermath inform Han’s preoccupation with patriarchal military violence and the examination of the nature of human violence. In the interview she says, “Violence is part of being human, and how can I accept that I am one of those human beings? That kind of suffering always haunts me. Yes. I also think my preoccupation extends to the violence that prevails in daily life” (Lee 61). In her gutting novel Human Acts, Han writes about the aftermath of the massacre through the perspective of six different narrators, connected to the murder of a middle school student, reminiscent of the killings of hundreds of students by the military junta. Adhy Kim in her essay, “Han Kang’s Speculative Natural Histories Beyond Human Rights” examines how the act of recollecting human rights violations in the Cold- War is connected to old colonialisms. For postcolonial nations like South Korea, post-World War II development involved aligning with the Global North. Kim avers that the paradigm of human rights as constitutive of universal justice obviates the accountability of global capitalism and its role in producing new forms of violence. The language of human rights does not sufficiently attend to the issue of distributive justice, extractivism, the exploitation of labour, and its failure to critique the relationship between capitalism, militarism and gendered violence. Kim reads