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"THE SORROW OF WAR."
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Analysis of Bao Ninh's autobiographical novel.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Analysis of Bao Ninh's autobiographical novel. Summarizes the timeframe (Post American withdrawl from Vietnam), plot and ideas of the novel. Psychological trauma suffered by protagonist who fought with North Vietnamese. Episodic presentation of events. Protagonist's memory of his early days in the Vietnam War Book's message that war transforms the nature of human consciousness.
Paper Introduction:
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 clean
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The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. This voice is in first person, and he refers tohimself as a 4 -year-old veteran of the war who is living in Hanoi.Initially (and for much of the novel) it seems that this narrator must beKien himself, only a few years older (not the case, as will be seenshortly). After the war, Kien can work up no enthusiasm whateverfor Vietnam's venture into Cambodia or for a society, and his postwar visitto Phuong's mother, who has no word of Phuong, further distances her fromKien. Reflecting on the progress of his novel, Kien recalls "murderousfirefights, in fighting so horrible that everyone involved prays to Heaventhey'll never have to experience any such terror again." Kien-as-novelistcontinues: Dying and surviving were separated by a thin line; they were killed one at a time, or all together; they were killed instantly, or were wounded and bled to death in agony; they could live but suffer the nightmares of white blasts which destroyed their souls and stripped their personalities bare. Thus does Kien disappear from what has been his own novel. Here, then, above all a fine and penetrating mind is called for, to search out the truth by the tact of its judgement (Clausewitz 14 ).Repeatedly, The Sorrow of War evokes fog, clouds, wind, mist, and/or smokethat obscure the clarity of view, thus complicating an already difficultwar event. Trans. Naïve Kien is insulted as a "spoiled little bourgeois" by one of theNVA soldiers who jokingly tell him that Phuong is whoring with militarytruck drivers (22 ). The true sorrow of waris that because it makes human life so precarious it destroys trust, oranyway the human capacity for trust in the idea that what is known to bereal is endurable. Kien is the only son of parents whoseparated because of politics after Dien Bien Phu. Now they were merely names and remains . New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. . Torn between hatredand despair, Kien almost kills one of the officers, then almost killshimself. A group of NVA officers there lewdly explain that she hasgone off, voluntarily, with some other soldiers: She has become a whorewhom he cannot forgive, even though she was brutalized. The sheer scale of horror and loss ofloved ones and comrades by turns horrifies, confuses, and ultimatelydesensitizes him, puncturing his conception of truth in general andsupposed conveyors of truth in particular, and driving him to find histruth by writing it down in the form of a fiction. . Life isnot supposed to be insane, but war is, and the book shows how the residueand substance of insanity realizes (= makes real) sorrow. Ed. But he has relinquished that hope several years later when hehas the dream of hearing Phuong call for him and of himself floating towarddeath (227). His father, an artist and museum curator whodrinks to excess because his painting is too bourgeois to suit the Party,descends into insanity, first painting only in yellow and eventuallyburning all of his paintings. . He decides to abandon her. The nextnarrative stream, which closes the book, sees the return of the first-person narrator, who turns out to be one of Kien's neighbors; the two havehad a nodding acquaintance, though "I" suspects that he and Kien hadencountered each other at some point during the war. Anatol Rapoport. There's a new life ahead of me, and a new era for Vietnam. At the site of the wreck, some sailors grab Phuongand gang-rape her; she is virginal. The Sorrow of War seems to notice, too, that thevictors and vanquished are not the ones who do the actual fighting. . His mother stylesherself a New Intellectual and enthusiastic Party member who, just beforedeserting the family, looks forward to her son's joining the Youth Unionand becoming a brave man. The second stream comprises Kien's specific memories oflife 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 pointof view. . The text continues: "It was from that moment,when Phuong was violently taken from him, that the bloodshed truly beganand his life entered into bloody suffering and failure" (18 ). The past-tense, episodic accounts of Kien's prewar, war, and postwarexperiences take up most of the balance of the text until the close of thenovel. The Sorrow of War argues that it takes winning a war and the host ofpostwar experiences that entails to explain to a soldier what irony, whichcan be interpreted as the content and substance of the fog of war, means. The next narrative block returns to present-tense Kien, who hasundertaken the task of writing his war experiences "to rid himself of hisdevils" (49). . . . Kien recalls"frenzied campaigns championing the 'Three Alerts' and . Soon after his father's death, occurring the first day the US bombsHanoi in 1965, Kien joins the army. On War. . 'ThreeDon'ts,' which forbade sex, love, or marriage among the young people"(131). For the text explains that Kien would remember the dimimage of Phuong being dragged away, screaming, "as his first war wound,"not the blood from the blast. . The connection between the fog of war as Clausewitz formulates itand Kien's entire life experience is so easily made by a reader that it isdifficult not to suspect that Ninh, too, is about the business of makingthe same connection. This research examines the autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War byBao Ninh, who was a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War and aten-year veteran of the military. Kien wakes after the event and findsher, then kills a sailor who comes back for more. Trans. London: Penguin, 1982.Ninh, Bao. On impulse shedecides to hitchhike with him and say good-bye, then ride back north toschool. Such is the first day of the Vietnam War for Kien and Phuong.Beginning with that abandonment, Kien makes a project of hardening himselfto the needs of combat, even though he makes the mistakes of inexperience.For example, he wastes time trying to figure out how he can help his firstcommander, Quang, who is blown in half by a shell before his eyes, who begsKien to shoot him instead, and who gets a grenade to blow himself up,laughing hysterically as he does so (94-7). I leave you nothing but that sorrow (Ninh 126). Frank Palmos. One suspects that, as Kien contemplates forever aching withlonging to return to the naïve moments "of the first sparks of war" thattransformed his existence, this "forever" will not last very long. The narrative thread of The Sorrow of War must be pieced together fromthe episodic presentation of events. In particular, the blast in the text that separates Kien fromPhuong, when he is knocked out and she is carried off, is book-ended by anoddly tender moment in a corner of the freight car in which she invites himto be her lover (178-9), and the lifting of a fog at the moment that Kien"seemed also to regain his faculties" (18 ). He dreams of floating toward his death in a river and hears what hetakes to be "the final call of his first love," waking with the insightthat "[f]orever he would ache with longing" for a past filled with"loyalty, friendship, brotherhood, comradeship, and humanity," which is ofcourse exactly what the reader knows from the story his past has not beenfilled with--indeed, has been overfull of exactly the opposite. But my soul is still in turmoil. In battle after battle, thingsget increasingly bizarre. Kien sees many people, civilians and fellowsoldiers alike, die messy deaths or vaporize from napalm before his eyes,but by the time he is an officer he is inured to such behavior as grabbingthe leg of a woman's body and pulling it down the steps, with her "skullthud[ing] down the steps like a heavy ball" (1 2). Kien, who survived thetrauma physically, recalls the incidents as episodes of insanity. [or] not even that.Some had been totally vaporized . The novel unfolds through three streams of narrative, and it isimportant to understand their structure as a mechanism of storytelling ifthe novel as a whole is to make sense to the reader. More important, by no means is that sense of destructionconfined to the losing side; indeed, as Kien discovers in the very firstdays of the war, winners fight brutally, not only the armies of the losingside but also among themselves, with special brutality, for the spoils ofwar. . This comes in the form of aletter that Kien receives toward the end of the war from one of the NVAofficers at the bombed-out school in 1965, who just can't apologize enoughfor the fact that he and his fellow officers lied about the lovely girl hehad been with, who returned to the classroom to look for him and who,obviously much in love with him, waited another day for him to return,finally leaving with vague plans to join the Volunteer Youth Brigade (225-26). His plan in general is to marry Phuong,the girl next door. In part that is because of the difference in Kien's maturityat the beginning and ending of the war, and of course the title of thenovel holds a clue to the content of that maturity. Phan Thanh Hao. Kien's failed life varies inversely with the triumph of his country.The Sorrow of War takes the view that triumph in war vividly demonstratesnothing so much as how stupid and shameful war makes those who fight warsfor the victors, just as shameful and stupid as it makes those who fightthem for the vanquished. . He is wounded himself,once by a woman with whom he foolishly lets down his guard, in theaftermath of a battle in which he is ordered to "kill all men wearing whiteshirts and release those wearing yellow" (1 4). The message of this book is that war transforms the nature of humanconsciousness. The third stream of narrative emerges in the context of Kien'sdecision to begin life anew, or anyway to try to forget the war, by themethod of writing a novel about the war, thus working through his memories.But that decision has not quite been made at the time that Kien seems neardespair over the war: From now on [thinks Kien] life may be always dark, full of suffering, with brief moments of happiness. I have to survive. No more sadness. One feature of the war that is treated with sharp irony is theapparently puritanical zeal with which North Vietnam prosecutes thepropaganda aspects of society in general and war in particular and thedisinterest with which Kien regards them. Ed. The research will set forth a summary ofthe novel and then discuss the pattern of ideas in the narrative and themeans by which Ninh makes the ideas emerge, with a view toward identifyingthe message the author intends to convey through the work. This first-person-peripheral character has had many experiences similar to Kien's. J.J. Works CitedClausewitz, Carl von. Thiscontext of Kien's experience becomes the context for the entire novel,which works through Kien's postwar psychoneurotic trauma and stress bymeans of describing as psychoneurotically, indeed insanely, traumatizing atthe time virtually all war incidents for Kien. liquidized into mud" (Ninh 25). Graham. Kien leads a deeplytraumatized Phuong to shelter in a bombed-out school to rest, but he wakesto find her gone. . Thecourse of Kien's disjointed recollections begins from the perspective ofthe messy aftermath of MIA remains recovery, in which the corpses are nolonger either "honorable or disgraced . . Phuong and Kien skip a schoolmeeting regarding "Three Golden Rules of Preparedness" (118). However,Kien's soul appears to have been destroyed and his personality stripped ina way that has not been the case with the first-person narrator. there will still be great sorrow, sorrow passed down to you. Young asKien is, he is a seasoned veteran of war action lasting some ten years, andthis cleanup mission in what Kien refers to as the Jungle of ScreamingSouls evokes the first of a series of flashback memories of horrific waraction as well as of the loss of comrades, not only due to battle but alsodue to the vicissitudes of what is commonly called combat fatigue. At that point the reader learns that Kien has by and large not ridhimself of the devils but has pretty much lived "deep in desperation"(227). 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). Amuch-cited passage of Carl von Clausewitz's On War illustrates the point: War is the province of uncertainty: three-fourths of those things upon action in War must be calculated, are hidden more or less in the clouds [fog] of great uncertainty. . . First there is theongoing postwar experience of Kien, which unfolds in the present tense.That stream opens the novel and positions Kien as the central characterwhose recollections, beginning at age 28 and ending at about age 4 ,dominate the story. Then he sees her, by chance, wandering back toward the road andcalling his name. Opening just after the rainy season, which is also several monthsafter the American withdrawal from Vietnam in April 1975, The Sorrow of Warintroduces the soldier Kien, now in his late twenties, who is participatingin a missing-in-action "remains-gathering" team in a muddy jungle. But the fact is that Kien's 18-year-old mind never quite regains its faculties, nor does it do so ten-oddyears on. Kien is consoled and briefly hopeful that he will find Phuong andreclaim her. Kien had perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any other contemporary writer. Kien is called home from school at 17, justin time to hear his father's final ambiguous (actually quite sane andironic) words: New times are coming, splendid and magnificent and trouble-free times. Why this is so is located in what could be called the denouement tothe climax of the novel, which is a detailed account, hinted at throughoutthe text but never fully explained until this point, of that first war dayin which Phuong is raped and Kien deserts her. Several months later, on the train to join his regimentat the front in the south, he meets Phuong by chance, now a universitystudent who is willing to do her bit for the war effort. My memories of war are always close by, easily provoked at random moments in these days which are little but a succession of boring, predictable, stultifying weeks (Ninh 44).At this point in the text, which is divided throughout not by chapters butinstead by shifting narrative streams marked by extra spacing, a newnarrative voice emerges. heroic or cowardly, worthy orworthless. On the way, a freight train they are riding in is bombed, and Kienis knocked unconscious. But the shift in Kien'sattitude is much more profound than his coming of age, which, indeed, thewar interrupts in its first day.
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