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 are not driven to such a point, and if they were the works themselves could not have been made. However, with one such mute character, each work reminds the reader or viewer that at its worst war destroys something basic in the human being, especially in the most sensitive of human beings, whether it actually takes the life of that human being then or later.
Nick is the mute character in The Deer Hunter. There is no doubt that he has been rendered hopeless ...