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The Sorrow of War is a semi-autobiographical novel by Bao Ninh, in which he implements a non-linear narrative structure to tell his story of his survival from the horrible trenches of the Vietnam War. This book is written in a stream of consciousness with frequent shifts of narrative point of views juxtaposed with descriptions of recent events and of the distant past. Plautus, a famous Roman playwright of the old Latin period once said, “Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.
It is the ‘conscious guilt’ of the fragmented and ‘wretched’ psyche of the protagonist Kien, along with its unique non-sequential writing style that serves as the driving force of the plot.
Through the use of this technique, Ninh enables the reader to live through Kien’s sentiments of his longing for the untainted times in his past and feel the effects of survivor’s guilt from the horrors of war on the character's memory (i.
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e. his inability to live in the present); it is through this non-linear presentation that the author can better convey his feelings, emotions and the pivotal point of his experience to the reader.
Because of the lack of chronological organization and the constant jumps between first and third person point of views in the novel, the reader is constantly embedded in Kien’s distraught mindset of the past, in which he jumps back and forth from present to past and back to present. Kien’s first flashback of Phuong in the book is one of passion and regret.
When Kien hears of his comrades’ affairs with the farm girls, he begins thinking back to the source of his love, when he too was worthy of being a lover and in love.
The author uses vivid descriptions, metaphors and similes to create imagery in the reader and to help the understanding of their once pure desirable love. However, he also highlights the cruelty and destruction that the war had brought upon his love; war was a no place for romance. Next, Kien then recalls his childhood spent with Phuong at the West Lake, a period of only affection and courtship. The author uses warm descriptors to create a sweet and cheerful atmosphere, coinciding with the characters’ contented and pleased moods.
His time spent with Phuong at the lake provides the chastest affection that he felt during their relationship and it seemed inevitable that they would be happy. However, it is the war that has prevented his dreams from being realized, keeping him from his true love. The deeper exploration of Kien and Phuong’s relationship, their sexual desire for one another and refusal to obey the social norms of the school exhibit their ardent and heartfelt love that they shared, emphasizing the difficulty that Kien would have in forgetting the past.
The narrative structure enables Kien’s non-stop vignettes of the joyful times with Phuong to show how much he dreads the present because of the hardship he has been through. The structure of the novel pushes the reader’s understanding of the effect of the sorrow of war and survivor’s guilt on memory; Kien struggles to live in the present without the horrendous reminiscences of his experience in the Vietnam War. Following the war, Kien suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, a psychological disorder in which he is unable to let go of a distressing event of the past.
His disorder is mainly built upon his survivor’s guilt, in which his self doubt and feelings of unworthiness manifest into alcoholism, depression and anxiety. The book depicts scenes of when Kien is writing his story in a manuscript; Kien tries to write about less gruesome happenings during the war, but he is unable to as he is continuously haunted by the horrible furnace of war memories. Soon as he continued writing, each page revived a painful story of death after another and gradually swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war.
Another aspect of Kien’s trauma is his constant dreams of the heinous events of the war. The author uses imagery and metaphors, describing the nightmares as twisted, crazy, poisonous and horrible to paint into the author’s mind a never ending ghost pestering Kien. Lastly, the main contributor to his guilt is his remembrance of Hoa, the woman who sacrificed herself to save Kien and his battalion. Kien had been lost in the jungle with his men and it had been Hoa that shot the trace dogs, diverted the enemy soldiers away and sacrificed herself to save the soldiers’ lives.
Kien’s failure to take initiative and do what Hoa did remains a thorn in his chest; seeing a woman have more courage than him to sacrifice herself is the direct cause of Kien’s survival guilt. Ninh’s usage of this distinctive narrative structure show ultimately what remorse and fear Kien has derived from the war. The common everyday occurrences such as smells on the streets that trigger Kien’s emotional retell of a murder he committed or witnessed show his inability to live in the present without remembering the stifling past.
Had the novel been written in a more conventional narrative structure instead of this non-linear method, the over encompassing theme of the far-reaching effects of war and the emotional scars left on the survivors would not have been conveyed as effectively; by using an unconventional technique of writing, the author can make clear the most important part of his adventure to the reader. When he presented his encounters as flashbacks from the present, instead of logical recollections, it offers a much better emotional turmoil for the reader to relate to.
For example, the initial purity of the love between Kien and Phuong when it is first recalled contrasted the setting depicted at the time of war and distress. The reader thus can understand that Kien’s drift away from the present serves as an escape from the terror he was going through. Next, Kien’s first experiences of the war such as his joining of the battalion and his first killings are recounted at the end of the book. This structural choice suggests that these two events are the most important.
Also, for Kien, it implies that the killings and what happened to Phuong remained the most traumatic part of the war. The novel is given a strong sense of layering where the narrative thread is similar to that of peeling an onion – as layers of experience and feelings are uncovered, one event after another is stripped away to reveal the core truth of Kien’s individual journey, something that a typical writing style would not have achieved.
Ninh offers a fresh and unconventional non-linear narrative through which he shares his remarkable story. Kien’s overwhelming guilt from having survived the war when his fellow comrades suffered an ill fate is compellingly portrayed through the many flashbacks that plagued him throughout his daily life. Finally, it further exemplifies and advances the central theme of the devastating consequences of war on all its survivors.
The Sorrow of War. (2017, Feb 02). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-sorrow-of-war-essay
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