The Sorrow of War Essay Questions

What is the significance of the mute girl in the context of the broader narrative?

The girl, who has no name in the text and cannot speak, is important beyond being Kien's sounding-board. She is the one with whom he leaves his novel, and this is no accident. As critic Andrew Ng explains, there is a "profound, metonymic connection [that] exists between the mute girl and Kien: in different but related ways, both individuals experience powerlessness and suffer from a deformity (physical in the case of the girl, and psychical in the case of Kien) that renders them socially othered... Kien’s traumatized position in this regard is akin to that of being mute, because he has been rendered silent by a postwar Vietnam whose focus on peace and nation-building inadvertently ends up discriminating against individuals like him— a constant reminder of the nation’s still recent notorious past."

How does the introduction of the unnamed narrator as a character change the reader's understanding of the novel as a whole?

The narrator at the end, whether he is supposed to be Bao Ninh himself in the text or not, is important as a means of establishing authorial distance, of someone else's words being proffered and thus able to escape potential censorship. The framing device distances Ninh from the horrible, cruel, less-than-glorious events "Kien" recalls. Another important aspect of this narrator, as Andrew Ng explains, is that he offers a wider perspective on the events of the story, creating space for hope and empathy. Ng's study of trauma suggests that "an important indicator of the degree to which resolution has been reached in a trauma narrative is the level of optimism offered at the end of the story...For me, the metafictional shift in Bao’s work is meant to achieve precisely such an effect. The introduction of an unnamed narrator not only adds another witness to Kien’s story, but the fact that that the unnamed narrator will eventually consolidate and publish the manuscript will further strengthen Kien’s reconnection with the world and reentry into history. His 'casual approach'...has to do with limiting considerably his editorial intervention in order to let Kien’s story flow 'in harmony with the reality it described'."

How is Kien similar to his father?

Kien doesn't initially seem too much like his father, especially when he is young. He isn't a free spirit or an artist, and, as Phuong says, he seems made for a time of war. He seems embarrassed by his father's idiosyncrasies and has difficulty understanding his last years and his last words. Yet Kien and his father are more similar than Kien thought, for they both engage with sorrow in a deep, nearly debilitating way. They both turn to art to let their emotions and memories purge themselves, Kien's father with the paintings and Kien with the art. Neither of them has any love for the Party, nor for its ideological limitations.

Is Kien a hero or anti-hero?

Kien has heroic aspects to his character: he does his duty; he tries to save others; he tries to live a life of meaning; he writes his novel to bring the dead back to life and to leave something to the rest of the world. Yet he also kills without remorse, loses himself in drugs and alcohol, is hypocritical and short-sighted, lets his emotions cloud his judgment, and extricates himself from society. He seems more of an anti-hero, then, for he is far from perfect. His personality traits, even before the war, make him somewhat unsympathetic, and his actions during the war reveal him as prone to selfishness, impatience, and callousness. He is very human in these contradictions, which makes The Sorrow of War a brutally honest and complicated look at war rather than a hagiographic account of an unrealistic hero.

What role do the dead play in the novel?

The dead haunt this novel, present in the Jungle of the Screaming Souls, in the nightly visits of Tranh Son, in Kien's memories, in letters, in novels, and in empty spaces which loved ones once occupied. They are not truly dead; there is a fungible boundary between life and death. The souls of the departed need recognition; they need to be kept alive by those who still live. Kien and his fellow soldiers set up altars and pay their respects, and then, after the war, Kien tells their stories, recalling their names and their circumstances with precision and empathy. Like ghosts, though, these stories are not fully complete and fade and reappear throughout the novel. Yet this is the task of the living: to keep the dead alive, even when the authorities and civilians wish to move on.