Anti-War Messages
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All three of the works--Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War, the Michael Cimino-directed film The Deer Hunter, and Nguyen thi Minh Hgoc's short story "The Madagascar Plum"--send powerful anti-war messages in which muteness in characters is used to convey the horror of war. In other words, that horror is so overwhelming that the characters who are most deeply affected by it are rendered incapable of even expressing themselves, their suffering, their rage, their helplessness, and any thought of emotion. They are, in a sense, completely deadened by the war, if we see self-expression as a requisite of true human existence, although they remain alive. The muteness of the three characters in the three works is also a kind of denial of what has happened to them. The little girl in Hgoc's story, for example, seems to be stuck in the past in her bombed village, returning to it to help her mother and another old woman, but also in the hope of retaining some connection with the past that is gone forever. In a sense, then, the muteness is both an attempt to deny what has happened by shutting down emotionally and physically, but it is also an attempt to express the horror by showing that there are no words to describe it. The message of each work is emphasized by the presence of a mute character. The message is that war is horrible and that it includes experiences which simply cause the human communication system to shut down or overload to the breaking point. Of course, most people
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otion now and then:
If we spoke sweetly to her, she'd open her lips a little and smile. If we spoke sharply, she'd press her lips together, and her eyes would flash, glaring-- (Ngoc 5).
Perhaps this "glaring" plays a part in the men's belief that she was hiding something of danger to them. In fact, is it any wonder that a child would glare at men who had played a part in the destruction of her village, her way of life, her childhood, and most of the people she knew and loved? But from the men's perspective, she was a threat which they had to either understand or destroy. Because they could not understand how a child could be made mute by such horrors, they destroyed her, literally blew her to pieces. The child had been made mute by the war, but the soldiers had been made monsters.
Oh, Brother, her flesh landed piece by piece, piece by piece. Perfectly round brown balls, bright red, sharp white. . . . The moment Phong returned, I heard a chill rattle my spine. I couldn't yet be sure whether the small child had been unjustly condemned. . . . (Ngoc 8).
The very fact that the narrator could ever consider that blowing a small child to pieces with explosives could ever be a "just condemnation" demonstrates just how inhuman the
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Approximate Word count = 1729
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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