Empire of the Sun Literary Elements

Autobiographical, War

Shanghai, China and Japanese P.O.W. camps during the 2nd World War

Narrated in the third-person and is told completely through the lenses of a young boy, Jim, as he experiences the horrors and privations of war.

Though the horrors of war are described in detail, the tone is decidedly cold and emotionless, told in a matter-of-fact manner.

Jim, the young narrator, is the protagonist and the antagonist is War itself.

The first major conflict begins when Japanese occupy the Shanghai International Settlement and in the ensuing hostilities Jim is separated from his parents forcing him to survive on his wits and determination. The second major conflict occurs when he is imprisoned in the Japanese P.O.W. camp to experience life alongside captives like himself.

The Japanese army, facing imminent defeat, forces the Jim and the rest of the P.O.W.’s to march on to Nantao under the pretext of moving them to another camp where there are more resources. The Japanese army however plan to execute all the POW’s once they get to Nantao. Fortunately Jim was able to escape the forced march and return to Camp Lunghua.

The Japanese soldiers that once indulged Jim questions suddenly begin to respond to him with either impatience or outright hostility because of their new orders from their superiors: execute all the P.O.W.’s.

Jim succinctly sums up his experience of war noting “…In a real war, no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies…” an oversimplification of the reality that war was an ugly, extremely chaotic affair.

There are no literary allusions in the novel however events in history, notably the bombing of Pearl Harbor are mentioned prominently.

Jim’s descriptions of images of war, chaos, destruction, and death become more and more gruesome as the hostilities progress. The sheer number and frequency of the sight of dead bodies also increases as the novel progresses. Despite the vividness of the descriptions however there is a distance and a coldness that permeates the narrative.

Jim, despite his British citizenship and ethnicity, identifies more with the Japanese soldiers seeing them as proud, noble warriors fighting for a cause. He has learned to look up to them because of his disappointment in seeing British P.O.W.’s—broken, defeated, bitter men who treat him as a nuisance rather than a fellow citizen.

There is a constant parallel drawn by the author in describing death and sleep. He describes the bodies of fallen soldiers buried is shallow graves as “…the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts…” He also describes the corpses piles up in mass graves “…In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war…” This is deliberate on part of the author as he views death to be the only peace—peace comparable to that of deep, restful sleep—that the soldiers will ever truly experience while the war wages on.

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Jim admits in an internal monologue that “…he had been trying to keep the war alive, and with it the security he had known in the camp…” referring to the war as if it was a living being. He does this because in his determination to survive he had learned to look at war as his “normal” and that in changing what he had learned to embrace as his normal would somehow be tantamount to betraying apart of himself.