The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past.
Through Kien, the narrative captures the horrors of war and permanent marks of trauma they leave soldiers with. The majority of the novel sees Kien recounting the episodes of his experiences in the war by subjecting himself to the emotional pain he felt. This assertion highlights the nature of grief in the heart of a soldier which sends them back to the source of the trauma. The experiences coagulate as a singular, all-encompassing sorrow within them, similar to the way in which the sorrow of love is felt generally as a melancholic feeling that encompasses all the single moments of past times.
It was clearly those same friendly, simple peasant fighters who were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of this war, yet they never had a say in deciding the course of the war.
Kien isn't impressed by Communist Party leaders, either refusing to mention them at all or evincing his frustration that they want to send people off to die again in a war against Pol Pot. He saves his praise for quiet, ordinary men and women who sacrifice everything to fight. Most of them are peasants, and they will reap few rewards if they survive the war. Their needs and views weren't taken into account in the first place, Kien notes, and certainly, now that victory is secured, it isn't necessary to consult them.
His whole life from beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void.
One of the postmodern aspects of the novel is how it seems unmoored in a particular place and time, rapidly shifting back and forth between war, prewar, and postwar. This helps suggest Kien's mindset, which he articulates in this quote. The war has fundamentally altered his consciousness, collapsing time upon itself and leading him to either see it as apart from him or as something he is in the middle of without understanding his precise temporal location. When he writes his novel, he cannot stick to a logic or structure; instead, he lets his memories pour out in a non-chronological way that nonetheless helps him make sense of the trauma he experienced.
But the act of writing blurs his neat designs, finally washing them away altogether, or blurs them so the lines become intermixed and sequences lose their order.
As mentioned above, Kien's novel is not linear. He comes to write with plans that defeat him, ideas that fizzle out, and intentions that shift. He seems unable to control the novel, often personifying it to suggest its control over him. He does not really get to say what form it takes or what content is included or elided. This is not problematic, though, for this is exactly the form of writing that helps Kien start to move through his deeply troubling and complicated memories. He would never have been able to use a novel's traditional form to make sense of what he did and saw, but this sort of unconscious writing moves him through his trauma and closer to a space beyond it.
"My two brothers, my classmates, and my husband, too, were all younger than you, and joined up years later than you. But none of them has returned. From so many, there is only you left, Kien. Just you."
Lan is definitely not trying to make Kien feel bad for surviving, yet, listening to her words, Kien must be feeling the devastating sense of survivor's guilt. All of these young men close to her died, did not come home, and left their loved ones behind—yet Kien is still here. Why? What are the rhyme and reason? Is there something special about him? Is it God, luck, skill, karma, fate, or something else? Kien and others who returned from the war have to ask themselves these questions constantly as those around them mourn the fact that their own people did not return. It's a heavy burden that is not easily alleviated.
"Just because of that you wanted to kill him?"
Kien is a very human and relatable character in that he often contradicts himself. In this quote, he cannot believe the man at the airport wanted to murder the other man because he violated the corpse, but earlier in the war, he had wanted to shoot Hoa because she could not immediately find the right way to get to the path they needed. This highlights that war is messy and complicated, and a soldier cannot always predict how they will respond or what the right thing to do or think in a certain moment might be.
Oanh had been sympathetic, and look what had happened to him.
Kien laments the fact that war means an altering of morality, an inversion of what being a good person is supposed to bring about. Oanh was good in that he let the woman he was supposed to kill go, but he was not rewarded for this; rather, he was killed for being "sympathetic." If a person in war wants to give in to their natural impulse of mercy, they may very well be rewarded for it with death. War suppresses all human sentiment of compassion and grace, rendering people automata.
I envied his inspiration, his optimism in focusing back on the painful but glorious days. they were caring days, when we knew what we were living and fighting for and why we needed to suffer and sacrifice. Those were the days when all of us were young, very pure, and very sincere.
The unnamed narrator at the end, who may be Bao Ninh in some capacity, says he and Kien have the same sorrow and the same fate, yet while the narrator has found a way to live in the present, Kien has found a way to live in the past. This is not a criticism or a commentary on any "weakness" of Kien's that he cannot stay in the present or hope for the future; rather it is a commendation that Kien has embraced the memories of before the war in a way that embraces that recognizes painful experiences as nurturing, sustaining, and valuable.
The very characteristics of his spirit, his eccentricities, his free-flying artistic expressions and disregard for normal rules that annoyed others, were what attracted Phuong to him; she was a kindred soul.
Though Kien and his father have a lot in common, so do Phuong and his father. As Kien says he realized later, the two had a lot in common and were rendered either problematic or extraneous in the days of the ascendancy of Marxist rhetoric and the war itself. Free, artistic, eccentric souls, Phuong and Kien's father did not want to conform to what North Vietnam wanted of them. They did not care for war, nor ideology, nor dedicating their lives to sloughing off imperialism; rather, they wished to indulge in creativity, beauty, independence, and authenticity. Sadly, neither of them was able to live that life for themselves, which is a commentary Bao Ninh subtly offers on the oftentimes deadening nature of ideological adherence.
And that second's hesitation was paid for with the life of the only other scout still alive in his unit.
Ninh shows that there is no real logic underpinning what happens in war. A brief moment's hesitation, a missed train, a jammed gun, the wrong vehicle at the wrong time—the boundary between life and death is infinitesimal. There is no way to predict what will happen next. Life can be snatched away from a person during wartime for the most seemingly inconsequential of actions, leading to an utter collapse of understanding the meaning of life and one's actions within it. This can make people go crazy, so they must work to come to terms with it or risk losing their sanity.
