63 pages • 2-hour read
The Eyes Are the Best Part
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Chapters 55-73Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 55 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, mental illness, substance use, graphic violence, death, illness, and emotional abuse.
Ji-won stops at a gas station to clean herself off. As she travels back and forth with paper towels to the car to clean off all the blood, she feels blank and empty. She finds one of the man’s hairs on the seat, and she blows it out the window and watches the wind take it.
Ji-won feels a strange energy and, not wanting to head home, goes back to Alexis’s apartment to apologize for her behavior before. She parks outside her apartment and dials her number. Alexis answers the phone groggily. She agrees to come downstairs and meet Ji-won. Ji-won asks whether Alexis would still be her friend if she found out that Ji-won had done something bad. Alexis agrees, within limits. She asks whether Ji-won is okay, and Ji-won says she is before telling Alexis to go back to bed.
Chapter 56 Summary
Umma asks her daughters whether either of them has seen George. They tell her they haven’t, and Umma’s eyes tear up as she tells them that George promised to be home for dinner. They sit at the dinner table, bulgogi cooling before them, waiting for George to come home. After a half hour, Umma quietly says that she isn’t hungry and that she’s going to bed.
Ji-won stands up from her seat and confronts her mother, asking why she cares so much about a man who doesn’t care about her in the slightest. She tells Umma that she’s being pathetic and that she doesn’t care how her actions affect her daughters. Umma’s eyes well up, and she runs to her room and slams the door shut.
Later that night, Ji-hyun tells Ji-won that she found a compromising photo (one of the ones that Ji-won placed in George’s presentation) folded underneath the couch. Ji-won tells Ji-hyun that George has most likely been looking at pornography when they aren’t home, and Ji-hyun agrees. Ji-won starts to tremble, wondering what’s going to happen to their family.
Chapter 57 Summary
One day after class, Geoffrey approaches Ji-won and asks to talk. He takes her to a seemingly random apartment building and sits on the front steps. He confesses to Ji-won that he’s been developing feelings for her. Ji-won tells him that she doesn’t feel the same, and Geoffrey reacts with anger, telling her to at least let him finish speaking. He begins to rant, claiming that he’s “not like all those other guys [she] know[s]” and wondering whether she doesn’t like him because he’s white (233). Ji-won pushes him away and sprints back toward campus. She hears Geoffrey chasing her, which pushes her to run even faster. By the time she reaches the quad, Geoffrey is gone. Ji-won realizes that she’s missing her backpack.
She heads back in the direction she came, worried that she left her backpack with Geoffrey. She finds the apartment building, but her backpack is nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, she spies an oleander bush and remembers a story Umma used to tell her about how poisonous this particular plant is.
Chapter 58 Summary
Unable to find her backpack, Ji-won heads home to get a ratty replacement out of the closet. When she gets to class the next day, there’s a palpable tension in the air. Alexis tells her that another mutilated body was found about a mile away and that there are rumors of a serial killer targeting students swirling around campus. Ji-won’s stomach drops as she realizes that the knife, the murder weapon, is inside her lost backpack.
After class, she sprints to her car in hopes the knife might be there but can’t find it. She drives home in a panic. On the way, she hallucinates that the man sitting next to her at the stoplight is accusing her of murder. She desperately searches through the apartment for the backpack, including going through Ji-hyun’s things in case she took it. Unable to find it, Ji-won stifles a rising scream.
Chapter 59 Summary
Ji-won has a dream of being confronted by Alexis (who here has blue eyes) and killing her in self-defense. She bolts up in bed, awake and full of anxiety, and calls Alexis to ask whether she has her backpack. Alexis says she doesn’t and tells Ji-won to go back to sleep. The following day in class, Alexis brushes past Ji-won coldly. Ji-won thinks that Alexis isn’t special and is just like everyone else.
Chapter 60 Summary
George has been refusing to speak about the wedding, leading Umma to confront him, asking whether he’ll even be attending the ceremony in two weeks. She hangs up the phone, weeping, and crawls into Ji-won’s lap for comfort. She promises Ji-won that things will be different after the wedding, but Ji-won doesn’t believe her, blaming the men in their life—Appa and George—for their current misfortunes.
Chapter 61 Summary
Ji-won sits at a table in the library, consumed with anxiety over her missing backpack and knife. Geoffrey sits down across from her, grinning, and asks whether she wants to date him yet. Ji-won responds that she doesn’t and gets up to leave. Geoffrey follows her as she walks to an empty section of the library’s stacks.
Geoffrey confronts Ji-won, demanding to know why she doesn’t like him and claiming she never even considered dating him. He takes a step toward Ji-won, and she backs up against a wall, trapped by him. Ji-won asks whether he’s the mysterious man who has been following her. Geoffrey doesn’t deny this and claims that he needed to watch over her for her own protection. He also reveals that he took her backpack. He tells her that she can have it back once she’s proven to him that she deserves it.
Chapter 62 Summary
Umma lies in bed for three days, watching Korean soap operas and crying. Despite this, she’s continued to create paper flowers for the wedding decorations, showing Ji-won how she creates them. Ji-won feels strong resentment toward her for bringing George into their lives.
Chapter 63 Summary
Umma makes fish for dinner for the first time in a long while. She sets out an extra set of utensils for George, even though he’s been absent from dinner for days. Over the past few days, Ji-won has driven by George’s apartment building multiple times and has witnessed him entering and leaving with Jen. Ji-won watches Umma cook, noticing her jarring thinness.
Chapter 64 Summary
On a Thursday morning, Ji-won awakens to an eerily silent apartment. Ji-hyun has left for school, and Ji-won enters her mother’s room to find her lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. She asks Ji-won whether there’s something wrong with her, as the men in her life keep abandoning her. She tells Ji-won that she followed George and discovered his apartment and his relationship with Jen. Ji-won helps her mother get out of bed and get dressed. Then she rushes around to prepare for her last final of the semester. She’s filled with fury and knows that “[t]onight, George will finally get what he deserves” (253).
Chapter 65 Summary
In the afternoon, Ji-won sits outside and enjoys the sunshine. She receives a text from George confirming that they’re still on for plans that evening at 5:00 pm. Before she enters the coffee shop where she and George plan to meet, she pulls out three of Alexis’s Ambien pills and crushes them into a powder.
When Ji-won arrives at the parking lot, she runs over to George’s truck and enters, shoving the laced drink into his hands before he can wonder what’s happening. She confirms that she’s the one who texted George, who was under the impression that he was meeting a potential client at the coffee shop.
She asks George whether he’s still planning on marrying Umma, and he doesn’t respond one way or the other. She then tells George that she heard him objectifying her and her sister over the phone. Suddenly, George begins to feel sick and dizzy. Ji-won helps him into the passenger seat, promising to drive him home. Instead, she pulls into an empty construction site and parks on the grass. Ji-won sits, shivering with excitement, knowing that she needs to work quickly before Geoffrey arrives.
She then leans over the drugged George with her paring knife, excited to savor the meal she’s anticipated for months now. She slides the knife under one of his eyelids, and he suddenly awakens, grabs her, and begins to choke her. He beats her against the seats as headlights pull into the parking lot next to them.
Just then, Geoffrey appears over George’s shoulder and slams a rock down onto his head over and over. Ji-won hears sirens, and everything goes black.
Chapter 66 Summary
Ji-won slowly wakes and sees Umma hovering over her. She feels an IV in her arm and realizes that she’s in a hospital bed. Half her hair is missing, and there is a raised line of stitches across her head. Ji-won asks her family what happened. They tell her that she had a brain tumor, which has since been removed, and that she’s been asleep for four straight days. Ji-won pictures George’s blue eyes but feels no desire like she used to.
Geoffrey has also been released from custody, as the police believed his story about happening on George strangling Ji-won at the construction site. Umma leaves the room, and Ji-hyun tells Ji-won that Umma has gone to see George, who survived the incident and is at the same hospital. Ji-won waits for her family to leave so she can see how George is doing.
Chapter 67 Summary
A week later, Alexis visits Ji-won in the hospital. She expresses concern and shows Ji-won Geoffrey’s constant texts asking to see her. Ji-won hides pills under her tongue and spits them out after the nurse leaves, feeling as if she deserves the pain they prevent.
Chapter 68 Summary
The doctors tell Ji-won that she’s free to go home in a few weeks. However, every time Umma visits, she makes an excuse to disappear, and Ji-won knows that she’s visiting George.
One day, Ji-won hears murmuring from the room next door and realizes that George is only one room over from hers. She confronts her mother about visiting George, but her mother claims she merely got lost.
Chapter 69 Summary
Umma and Ji-hyun visit Ji-won daily, and Alexis also checks in occasionally. Ji-won asks Umma whether Appa knows what happened to her, and Umma confirms he does, even though he hasn’t bothered to visit her. She also tells Ji-won that Appa’s new partner is having a baby, so Ji-won will soon have a baby brother.
Chapter 70 Summary
Ji-won crushes oxycodone into cranberry juice. Then she slips into George’s room and trickles the juice into his mouth. His breathing slows and then stops. Ji-won quickly cuts his eyes out of his skull and slips back to her room, where she mixes the eyeballs into her dinner and eats it lovingly. Then she calls Geoffrey and asks to talk.
Chapter 71 Summary
Geoffrey comes by Ji-won’s hospital room, begging to be given another chance and telling Ji-won that she has to date him now that he’s saved her life. Ji-won tells him that she’s terrified of George, who’s been put in the room next door. Geoffrey storms over to confront him, and Ji-won hears his terrified gasp when he spots George’s mutilated body. Just then, Ji-won starts screaming.
Chapter 72 Summary
The police officers drag Geoffrey away in handcuffs. One of the officers questions Ji-won about George, and she tells him that she woke to Geoffrey standing above her with a knife, threatening her and telling her what he was going to do to George. The officer leaves, telling her that Geoffrey’s actions aren’t her fault. Ji-won sits back, feeling pleased, as she knows that the previous murder weapon is at Geoffrey’s apartment and that he’ll take the fall for Ji-won’s killing spree.
Chapter 73 Summary
Chapters 55-73 Analysis
As the novel reaches its climax, parallel patterns of behavior continue to escalate. Umma’s devotion to George mirrors her earlier waiting for Appa, suggesting the persistence of emotional dependency, while Ji-won’s manipulation of Geoffrey echoes her previous manipulation of her high school friends. The text develops these patterns through recurring motifs of abandonment and betrayal, connecting present actions to past trauma and implying that Ji-won’s murderous behavior stems from the latter. For instance, Geoffrey’s possessive behavior parallels George’s controlling nature, creating a cycle of male dominance that Ji-won ultimately disrupts through violence. The text’s final focus on the father as the ultimate target further connects present violence to original trauma, underscoring cyclical patterns of harm and revenge. Ji-won’s identification of her father as the man ultimately responsible for all her struggles positions him as the source of the family’s dysfunction, suggesting that George served as a substitute target for her rage. The news of Appa’s new baby—a male child—connects to his earlier expressed disappointment in Ji-won’s gender, providing an explicit reasoning for her violent targeting of men.
At the same time, following the climactic confrontation with George and Geoffrey, the novel introduces an alternate, physical explanation for Ji-won’s increasingly violent behavior: a brain tumor. However, Ji-won still commits violence after the brain tumor is removed, killing George and framing Geoffrey for her previous serial murders. This continued violence emphasizes the social and cultural tensions that fuel her continued resentment and violent rage while raising questions about culpability and free will as they intersect with social and biological factors—e.g., whether Ji-won is more responsible for violence committed in response to racism and misogyny than she would have been for violence committed as the result of a brain disease. The text refrains from providing definitive answers, allowing the tumor to function both as a possible explanation and metaphor for larger notions of invasion and corruption.
For the first time in the novel, the setting shifts significantly, with much of the action of these later chapters happening in hospital rooms as opposed to Ji-won’s apartment or her university. As with earlier scenes in Ji-won’s home, however, what should be a “safe” environment is tainted by the threat (and ultimately the realization) of violence. The physical proximity of Ji-won and George in adjacent rooms creates irony, as George’s presence—which Ji-won only belatedly discovers—retroactively changes the comforting dynamics of family visits and emotional support. Moreover, details such as Ji-won hiding her pills underscore that the hospital is not exempt from the mechanisms of surveillance that have dogged her throughout the novel.
The culmination of Ji-won’s obsession with eyes, and the associated theme of Consumption as Power, takes on additional weight in this setting. The consumption of George’s eyes represents both the climax of Ji-won’s violent compulsion and a symbolic taking of power, as Ji-won’s schemes succeed and she’s the only one to emerge from her conflicts relatively unscathed. The text connects this act to earlier instances of eye consumption while amplifying its significance through the hospital setting’s sterile environment. This final act of consumption serves as both a resolution and a new beginning, suggesting the perpetuation of violence, particularly with regard to the ending threat Ji-won employs against Appa’s life.
Additionally, Ji-won manages to turn Geoffrey’s stalking to her benefit by framing him for the murders; his obsession with her becomes a convenient piece of evidence, as he’ll be tied to many of the crime scenes. This manipulation connects to earlier behavioral patterns (e.g., causing rifts among her friends by framing them for petty misdeeds) while suggesting evolution in Ji-won’s approach to power. The text presents this development without moral commentary, allowing readers to grapple with questions of justice and revenge.
In particular, the novel leaves open the question of whether Ji-won has merely appropriated the violence of patriarchy and white supremacy for her own benefit. Multiple different tensions come together to deny Ji-won her agency: Her father leaves the family, worsening their financial situation, George takes over their home, Geoffrey won’t take no for an answer, Umma behaves selfishly with little regard for her children, and Ji-won is constantly hit with microaggressions and blatant racism. The text’s positioning of Appa as Ji-won’s final target suggests that Ji-won’s previous acts of violence were rehearsals for this ultimate confrontation. In this way, Ji-won’s future confrontation with Appa is also her confrontation with all forms of exploitation and abuse perpetrated by men, as Appa embodies those tendencies. However, the text implies the limits of confrontation and revenge as means of coping with victimization, as Ji-won’s actions make her more and more violent, aggressive, and antisocial. In reclaiming her agency, Ji-won thus ends up imitating some of the more destructive aspects of interpersonal power, marking a significant twist on the theme of The False Promise of Assimilation: Assimilation not only does violence to the person who is assimilated but potentially remakes them as an agent of violence themselves.
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