Ji-won (Narrator) Character Analysis in The Eyes Are the Best Part

Overview: The Girl Who Learned to Want What Her Mother Wanted

Ji-won Lim is the eighteen-year-old narrator and protagonist of The Eyes Are the Best Part. A first-year college student living in a cramped seven-hundred-square-foot apartment with her mother, Umma, and her fifteen-year-old sister, Ji-hyun, Ji-won is introduced as a dutiful daughter navigating the aftermath of her father's abrupt departure. Over the course of the novel, her story traces a disturbing transformation: she moves from reluctantly gagging on a single fish eye at her mother's dinner table to murdering a stranger in an alley and surgically removing his eyes to consume them. Her narration is intimate and confessional, which makes the escalation feel less like a monster's emergence and more like a slow, logical surrender to hunger.

Ji-won is defined by a tension between self-awareness and self-justification. She knows she is lying to her sister about their father's return; she knows her obsession with eyes is consuming her; she knows, after the alley murder, that she should feel horrified—and reports feeling nothing instead. This gap between what she understands and what she does is the engine of her character. She is not oblivious to her own darkness; she simply keeps choosing it.

Plot Role: The Unreliable Heart of the Story

Ji-won is both the lens through which every event is filtered and the agent who drives the plot toward its violent climax. Because she narrates, the reader experiences the family's grief, her mother's rituals, and the arrival of George—her mother's new boyfriend—entirely through Ji-won's perceptions. This makes her an inherently unreliable narrator: her jealousy of George, her fixation on his blue eyes, and her growing hunger color every scene she describes.

Her plot role is that of the dutiful daughter who becomes the family's protector by increasingly monstrous means. In the early chapters, she protects her mother emotionally—eating the fish eye to cheer her up, lying to Ji-hyun that their father will return. By the end, she protects the family through violence, framing Geoffrey for George's murder and planning to punish her father for the suffering he caused. The novel's final chapters show her recovering in the hospital, already plotting her next move against Appa, which positions her not as a reformed character but as one whose protective instinct has fully curdled into predation.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Ji-won's primary motivation is to keep her mother from falling apart. This is established early: in chapter 6, after her father's dismissive phone call leaves Umma despondent, Ji-won decides to eat the fish eye "to cheer her up and show her that I care about her." She forces herself to swallow it despite gagging, and her mother's delighted reaction confirms the strategy works. This pattern—sacrificing her own comfort to stabilize her mother—recurs throughout the novel.

A second motivation is her desire for control. Ji-won has been abandoned repeatedly: her father left for another woman, and her three best friends went to UC Berkeley while she was rejected. In chapter 18, she reflects on the rejection with a bitterness she suppresses: "I'm not upset," she tells her friends, while internally asking, "Who are you trying to convince?" Her obsession with eyes gives her something she can possess completely—something she can take. The alley scene in chapter 45 makes this explicit: "It's so dark, Ji-won. You can do anything you want."

Her traits emerge through actions rather than stated intentions:

• Self-sacrificing: She eats the fish eye despite nausea, and later takes the blame for things to protect Ji-hyun.
• Deceptive: She lies to Ji-hyun about their father returning, and later lies to the police about Geoffrey.
• Obsessive: Her fixation on eyes—George's blue irises, the stranger's eyes in the alley—overrides her better judgment.
• Emotionally numb: After killing the man in the alley, she notes, "I should feel horrified, but I don't. I feel nothing."
• Resentful: She harbors deep anger at her father, at her friends who left her behind, and at George for taking her mother's attention.

Chronological Arc: From Reluctant Daughter to Calculated Predator

Ji-won's arc can be traced in distinct stages:

Stage 1: The Reluctant Participant (Chapters 1–5). Ji-won refuses the fish eye at dinner, feeling cruel about eating fish at all. She is still grounded in ordinary morality, disturbed by her mother's ritual but not yet drawn to it.

Stage 2: The First Taste (Chapter 6). She eats her first fish eye to comfort her mother. The act is framed as filial duty, but the chapter ends with her reaching for the second eye, "suddenly starving." The hunger has been awakened.

Stage 3: The Obsession Grows (Chapters 8–29). Ji-won meets Geoffrey, begins college, and watches her mother fall for George. Her fixation on George's blue eyes intensifies, and she begins to conflate desire with appetite. Her sleep deteriorates, and Ji-hyun notices she is "not like herself."

Stage 4: The First Murder (Chapter 45). Drunk and hungry, Ji-won encounters an injured man in an alley. She removes his eyes and consumes them. The scene is graphic and methodical, and her narration shifts into a dissociative register: "My mind is empty except for a blind desire to eat."

Stage 5: The Framing and the Plan (Chapters 72–73). After Geoffrey is arrested for George's murder, Ji-won tells the police a story that implicates him. She reflects that his fingerprints are on the weapon and that evidence will condemn him. In the hospital, she resolves to visit Appa and "punish him for what he has done." The arc completes: the girl who once felt cruel about eating fish is now planning murder as a form of justice.

Relationships: The People Ji-won Protects, Resents, and Consumes

Umma (mother). Ji-won's relationship with her mother is the emotional core of the novel. She loves Umma deeply and sacrifices constantly for her, but she also resents her mother's weakness. In chapter 73, she acknowledges she was wrong to blame her mother, recognizing that Umma's grief "stems from powerlessness." Yet her protectiveness is also enabling: by eating the fish eye, she validates the very ritual that feeds her obsession.

Ji-hyun (sister). Ji-won is protective of her younger sister, lying to comfort her and physically defending her from George's taunts. But she also withholds the truth, and Ji-hyun repeatedly calls out her lies: "I hate it when you lie to me. I can tell when you do it." Ji-won's secrecy creates a quiet rift that she never fully bridges.

Appa (father). Ji-won's feelings toward her father are a mix of longing and rage. She remembers his quirks fondly—the refrigerator box he kept "in case Ji-won needs a place to stay"—but she also discovered his secret email account and read his love letters to another woman. By the end, she holds him "ultimately responsible for the family's suffering" and plans to punish him.

George. Ji-won's relationship with George is charged with jealousy and disgust. She is repulsed by his performative appreciation of Asian culture and his taunting with the fish eye, but she is also fixated on his blue eyes. Her desire to consume him is both literal and symbolic: she wants what he has taken from her—her mother's attention, her family's stability.

Geoffrey. Geoffrey is a more ambiguous figure. He is kind to Ji-won at the coffee shop, but he also becomes the man she frames for murder. Her decision to implicate him is coldly pragmatic, and she reflects that the evidence will do the rest.

Key Decisions and Consequences

1. Eating the fish eye (Chapter 6). This decision, made to comfort her mother, awakens her obsession. The consequence is a hunger that escalates over the course of the novel.
2. Lying to Ji-hyun about their father (Chapter 2). This lie protects Ji-hyun in the moment but establishes a pattern of deception that isolates Ji-won from her sister.
3. Concealing her encounter with the man in the alley (Chapter 29). Ji-won tells Ji-hyun she "maybe imagined the whole thing," a lie that prevents anyone from intervening in her descent.
4. Killing the man in the alley (Chapter 45). This is the point of no return. Ji-won feels nothing afterward, which confirms that her moral compass has been fully replaced by appetite.
5. Framing Geoffrey (Chapter 72). Ji-won tells the police a story that implicates Geoffrey in George's murder. The consequence is that Geoffrey is arrested, and Ji-won is free to pursue her plan against Appa.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Ji-won is the embodiment of the novel's central themes. Her consumption of eyes connects directly to consumption as a coping mechanism for inherited trauma: she inherits her mother's ritual and turns it into something far darker. Her refusal to wait for her father's return, and her decision to take matters into her own hands, reflects the cycle of abandonment and the refusal to wait. Her fixation on eyes—on looking and being looked at—ties into the politics of looking and the reversal of the gaze, as she transforms from an object of her mother's expectations into an active, predatory viewer. The dinner table rituals she participates in and eventually subverts connect to domestic ritual as a site of control and resistance. Finally, her decision to punish Appa for the family's suffering embodies the burden of filial duty and the cost of protecting family.

For a full reading of how her choices resolve, see the ending explained page.

Five Questions About Ji-won, Answered

1. Why does Ji-won eat the fish eye in Chapter 6?

She eats it to cheer up her mother, who is despondent after a dismissive phone call from Ji-won's father. Ji-won decides beforehand that this is "the only way I can think of to cheer her up and show her that I care about her." The act is framed as filial sacrifice, though it also marks the beginning of her obsession.

2. What triggers Ji-won's transition from eating fish eyes to wanting human eyes?

Her fixation escalates gradually, but a key turning point is her encounter with George, whose blue eyes she becomes obsessed with. In chapter 22, she describes wanting the fish eye he taunts her with, and her internal voice says, "You want it. You want it so badly." The alley murder in chapter 45 is the culmination of this hunger, triggered by her drunken state and the sight of the injured man's blue eyes.

3. Why does Ji-won lie to Ji-hyun about their father?

She lies to comfort her sister, who asks if their father will return. Ji-won says yes even though she knows it is false. This establishes her pattern of protective deception, which later extends to concealing her own violent acts.

4. How does Ji-won justify framing Geoffrey for George's murder?

She does not explicitly justify it; instead, she narrates the practical details—Geoffrey's fingerprints on the weapon, evidence from his home and phone records—as though the case will resolve itself. Her reflection that "the incident was not her fault" suggests she has fully rationalized her role.

5. What does Ji-won plan to do at the end of the novel?

In chapter 73, she intends to visit Appa, whom she holds "ultimately responsible for the family's suffering." She plans to punish him for what he has done to her mother, her sister, and their family, and to ensure he can never harm them again. The novel ends before she acts on this plan, leaving her trajectory open.

For further discussion of these questions and more, see the questions and answers page.