The Sorrow of War

This research examines the autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, who was a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War and a ten-year veteran of the military. The research will set forth a summary of the novel and then discuss the pattern of ideas in the narrative and the means by which Ninh makes the ideas emerge, with a view toward identifying the message the author intends to convey through the work.

Opening just after the rainy season, which is also several months after the American withdrawal from Vietnam in April 1975, The Sorrow of War introduces the soldier Kien, now in his late twenties, who is participating in a missing-in-action "remains-gathering" team in a muddy jungle. Young as Kien is, he is a seasoned veteran of war action lasting some ten years, and this cleanup mission in what Kien refers to as the Jungle of Screaming Souls evokes the first of a series of flashback memories of horrific war action as well as of the loss of comrades, not only due to battle but also due to the vicissitudes of what is commonly called combat fatigue. The course of Kien's disjointed recollections begins from the perspective of the messy aftermath of MIA remains recovery, in which the corpses are no longer either "honorable or disgraced . . . heroic or cowardly, worthy or worthless. Now they were merely names and remains . . . [or] not even that. Some had been totally vaporized . . . liquidized into mud" (Ninh 25). This context of Kien's experience becomes the

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mares of white blasts which destroyed their souls and stripped their personalities bare. Kien had perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any other contemporary writer. He had seen roes of youthful American soldiers, their bodies unscathed, leaning shoulder to shoulder in trenches and dugouts, sleeping an everlasting sleep because artillery barrages had blocked their exit, sucking life from them (Ninh 89). The novel unfolds through three streams of narrative, and it is important to understand their structure as a mechanism of storytelling if the novel as a whole is to make sense to the reader. First there is the ongoing postwar experience of Kien, which unfolds in the present tense. That stream opens the novel and positions Kien as the central character whose recollections, beginning at age 28 and ending at about age 40, dominate the story. The second stream comprises Kien's specific memories of life before, during, and after the war, and it unfolds in the past tense. Both of these narrative lines are told from the third-person-limited point of view. The third stream of narrative emerges in the context of Kien's decision to begin life anew, or anyway to try to forget the war, by the method of writing a novel abo

Category: Literature - T