The Sorrow of War Literary Elements

Fiction

Vietnam, primarily during the war against South Vietnam and the Americans and subsequent decades (1960s-1990s)

An unnamed, third-person omniscient narrator.

Tone: anxious, despairing, fatalistic, tragic, gloomy, mournful

Mood: nightmarish, surreal, violent, hopeless

Kien is the protagonist; war is the antagonist.

How will Kien cope with the exhausting, sorrowful, and unrelenting trauma of his experience of war? Will his novel be an effective way of coming to terms with what he saw, did, and felt?

Kien and Phuong are on the freight train and it is bombed, leading to Kien's first physical wound as well as his separation from Phuong, who is raped. This moment was brutally impactful for both characters and indicated the war would be nothing but unrelenting sorrow, separation, and loss.

1. Phuong's sense that the sea at the youth camp was ominous and strange foreshadows the news that they will soon get that the war has started.
2. Ninh foreshadows what happens to Phuong on the train by writing, several times, that Kien felt a sense of unease while they were on their "adventure."

"As they stood there, his war had started" (165).

There are innumerable allusions to the real events and places of the Vietnam War: Tet Offensive, Hamburger Hill, the ARVN, the NVA, the Cambodian genocide, President Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin, etc.

The imagery that Ninh uses frequently concerns the overwhelming, unmitigated violence and trauma that come from war. There are horrifying scenes of death, discombobulating escape attempts, bombings, scenes of rape, eerie and ominous jungle scenes that are the calms before the storms, haggard soldiers, mourning survivors, and instances of psychosis, despair, and disintegration. These images are contrasted with the prewar scenes of peace, beauty, and love, especially exemplified by Phuong and Kien's lovely day by the lake.

1. "For that whole Sunday Kien wandered the streets in a trance, feeling a melancholy joy, like dawn mixed with dusk" (87).
2. "The luck of the unlucky" (166) is how Huy characterizes the fact that he and Kien were not on the train that was bombed.
3. "...this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won" (193).

1. Kien sees parallels between the sorrow of war and the sorrow of love: both are empty, painful pangs of the heart.
2. As Kien writes, his novel parallels the disintegration of his mind: he "blurs his neat designs" and the "sequences lose their order" (48), just like Kien himself as he goes through his postwar life .
3. Kien sees parallels between living and dying: "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" (89)

N/A.

1. "...and he felt death's hand on him" (6)
2. "But relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another..." (57)
3. "...the novel seemed to be in charge and he meekly accepted that" (88)
4. "But life would not let him go that easily" (121)
5. "War! War! The sea roared out its message in the small hours of 5 August 1964" (175)