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 context for the entire novel, which works through Kien's postwar psychoneurotic trauma and stress by means of describing as psychoneurotically, indeed insanely, traumatizing at the time virtually all war incidents for Kien. Kien, who survived the trauma physically, recalls the incidents as episodes of insanity. Life is not supposed to be insane, but war is, and the book shows how the residue and substance of insanity realizes (= makes real) sorrow.
The narrati...