Summary
As the months passed, the novel began to take on a logic and structure of its own. Kien went into a labyrinth of memories, with the deaths of soldiers setting the rhythm of the writing. He’d seen so many deaths and so many kinds of deaths. The soldiers who died seemed more important than the living, lonely and tranquil in their distance. Some with the MIA team could hear singing; there were so many stories attached to every unknown soldier, every remain found.
Once Kien and others found a coffin that contained a soldier who looked lifelike, still breathing. But the bag within which he was contained discolored and whitened, and it seemed like something escaped from it. Kien and his men prayed for the soul.
One of Kien’s scouts, Phan, told him a story of how he was in the middle of a battle and hid in a bomb crater, and an ARVN soldier fell in and he stabbed him, not realizing the man had already been badly wounded by his own artillery. Phan felt tremendous pity for him and went to find help, but darkness fell and he could not find the bomb crater again; he was forever tormented by the thought of that man’s barbaric death.
Kien felt that the sorrow of war was like the sorrow of love: both were a nostalgia, a missing, and a pain. If one focused on something too much, it could be unbearable; thus, Kien tried not to focus on the dead. Yet he could not avoid thinking of Quang, his first commander, and the shell that killed him. Quang begged Kien to shoot him so he could die but Kien kept trying to bandage him during the barrage. Finally, Quang found a grenade, yelled for everyone to leave, and blew himself up. Kien would never forget the crazed laughter echoing from Quang.
Another man said he heard crazed laughter and came across a hairy figure with a grenade in his hand near Hill 300. Another said it was the Forest Man, and another said it was Tung. They all talked of ghosts, Kien thinking constantly of Quang, and the men remembering Tung, who got a bomb fragment in his brain and became psychotic.
Kien and his men decided to investigate the site where the long-haired man was seen, and they called out to him. They heard howling laughter and finally saw a ghostly figure at a distance. There was another shady figure running near the other, bent-over. The men left food and talked endlessly about who these people might be.
Kien worked assiduously on his novel and more and more stories came back to him. In particular, he remembered April 30th, Victory Day in Saigon. He was fighting the ARVN at the airport and the NVA won. The men collapsed in exhaustion afterward. Kien awoke to the smell of food. Another soldier told him he’d been sleeping next to a corpse. Kien looked over and saw a naked young woman stretched out.
A tall, large soldier came in and tripped over the corpse, dropping his case of beer. He was embarrassed and angry; he grabbed the corpse by one leg and threw her down the stairs. Her mouth was agape and her head hit the steps. He then walked away, proud of himself.
The leader of the armored-car crew became incensed and wanted to try and shoot the soldier, but Kien stopped him. All around them men were looting, destroying. Finally, some of the men dressed the naked girl and laid her with the rest of the airport bodies.
The commander eventually apologized to Kien for freaking out and said that even though they were all sick of corpses, he could not handle that soldier treating a body like that. He told Kien that the soldier was essentially right for espousing the idea of being sure of yourself first. As he walked away, Kien scoffed at this “advice.”
He remembered Oanh’s death a month earlier. They were fighting the southern government’s police force, which conducted itself just as staunchly as the armed forces. They were supposed to kill people wearing white shirts but not yellow. Kien and Oanh took out machine gunners who were firing on them, then rushed up the hallway and threw grenades into rooms. Three people wearing white flashed past them and Kien started shooting, but Oanh yelled that they were women.
The women fell down, one girl slumping against the wall. The whole place was in utter chaos, the din deafening. Oanh told the girl to go, assuring her that no one would bother her. Kien got up and didn’t even hear the girl fire on Oanh. She would have killed him, too, if she did not run out of bullets. Kien shot her brutally and, in all his long years, never felt as badly about killing someone.
Now, at the airport, Kien thought about how Oanh was sympathetic but it killed him. He began drinking like the others, everyone dazed during that strange night. The atmosphere was surreal with flares bursting in the air randomly. Kien had been fighting for ten years, others thirty; war was their whole world.
Morning came and Kien felt lonely, knowing he’d be alone forever. V-Day was never for him what it was on TV or in the pictures. He did feel joy, but the thought of the corpse-girl haunted him often. Others thought he was odd for caring so much about someone he did not know, but she had “left a tragic and indelible imprint on his mind” (108).
Kien’s novel laid in pages, full of stories where the line between death and life was fine, blurred. The fighting refused to die, and those who lived and those who died intermingled.
There was a mute girl who lived om the attic space in Kien’s building where his father had kept his paintings. She opened a place in her heart for Kien. She saw him many times before they became friends, and he was polite to her. As for Kien, he wrote about her sometimes, though she did not know it yet. She did know he was a writer, and she heard people referring to him as “The Sorrowful One.” One evening he came to her door and she realized she’d been expecting him all along. He was drunk and his face was haggard but she gave him tea and he felt better. When he looked around at the room, she also realized he’d been here before because it was his father’s studio.
Kien spoke of ghosts and she read his lips. He told her she was in his novel and she has helped him remember things. He talked on and on as if he needed to. She held his hand while he did.
Weeks passed before he returned. It seemed like they needed each other in the attic, though they were not physical. He poured out all his stories and she would read the pain on his lips. He would then collapse, for she was his sounding board. She felt used and wanted to scream at him for taking control of her spirit but ignoring all other parts of her. She could not control her passion for him, though, and did not mind his drunkenness or his crises. Rumors started about them. She knew she was nothing to Kien, and he often called her by Hoa or Phuong or a naked girl at the Saigon airport. Still, he was irresistible.
One night, he brought her all his pages, saying he was done with the novel and did not know what to do with it. She saw he wrote to write, not to publish. She kissed him and he seemed unaware, so she kissed him again. He left and did not return for a few days. During a blackout some days later she had gone down to him but only listened at the partly-ajar door. He was old-looking, rundown. She was fearful of what would happen when he stopped writing again. Another blackout night she went to him again and they made love feverishly. He left when she was asleep and she knew she would never see him again. He had left his apartment for her, though, and all the pages were there. None were numbered but she gathered them up and kept them.
Kien wrote only at night now because it seemed like he could be truly his own. Neighbors knew about him and those active in the night like whores and burglars greeted him warmly. The darkness reflected his soul, and the nights were precious to him. He thought that time was running out, and though he was not afraid of death, he did not want to leave things unfinished.
Once he experienced a little death, his life force draining from him. He knew what it was, standing at the top of a hill and watching his stream of life flow away. It was the truth, and it showed all moments of his life.
He recalled Chu Van An school in April 1965 before war broke out. He was with his beloved Phuong, skipping a school meeting about war preparedness to swim in the lake. Everything was peaceful, beautiful, and intimate; it was the last time it would be that way.
After Chu Van An his mind went to the way people of his generation threw themselves into war, “making its own blood flow, and causing the blood of others to flow in torrents” (119). He saw the horrible months with the Tet Offensive and Second Tet and the 1972 dry season. Places where he stayed and fought came back to him. He saw himself and Elephant Tac with a captured machine gun, firing on the ARVN stragglers. Corpses piled higher than Kien had ever seen. The enemy was pushed on by the T54 tanks that entered their view. Suddenly Tac looked at himself with surprise, and sank down, wounded. All details were fresh to Kien. His own life would not slip away that easily. He had to pay the debt for his generation before he went. The fire within him “fueled by his own powerful memory, burned fiercely” (122).
Kien’s thoughts turned to his parents. His father, a sleepwalker and an eccentric, was all Kien knew. His mother left when he was young and there were only photographs and a few memories of her telling him to be a member of the Youth Union and then he’d be a real man. when he was seventeen and joined the army he thought about finding her but learned she had been dead for five years.
His father rarely mentioned his former wife. In his middle age, he stopped working at the museum and used the attic as a painting studio. his health declined and he talked to himself as he painted. Rumors abounded that the Party criticized him and kicked him out as a malcontent. Kien would visit the attic studio and his heart ached with compassion seeing the tortured, diabolic paintings. He would give his father a meal as the old man boasted about making a masterpiece one day. But he was drunk, out of step with the times, painting works “alien to the working-class understanding of art” (125). Toward the end of his life, he painted only in yellow—surreal, horrid landscapes with strange figures.
One spring when Kien was getting ready for war it was time for Kien’s father to die. An ambulance came for Kien at school and he went to his father. The old man’s last words concerned the end of an era and how Kien had to fight. He would leave Kien only sorrow. Later Kien would see that he’d destroyed all his paintings.
It took Kien years to understand some of his father’s pain and dying words. He was ashamed of himself for being ashamed of his father, but it was too late now. It was 1965 and things were changing. The day his father died was the first day on which air-raid sirens sounded in Hanoi, a “harbinger of dark days to come” 127). Kien ran upstairs to the attic, realizing his father had burnt the paintings. Now there was only nothingness—no paintings, no father.
Phuong was close with his father and was the only one who ever visited the old man in his studio. They were both obsessive both eccentric. She actually helped him with the burning of the paintings, understanding the action, but did not tell Kien until it the evening by the lake.
The two of them were inseparable. They had a desperate and pure and unsatiated love. Phuong was the envy of the other girls for her beauty and confidence. Authorities were concerned about them, especially as patriotic campaign argued against liberalism and romance.
That day by the lake they swam for hours. Night fell and they laid beside each other on the cool grass and looked at the stars and the sky. A red streak made them think there was a flare, though they did not hear the siren.
Analysis
By now, it is clear that Kien’s writing his novel is a way to exorcise his demons, and, on a meta-level, The Sorrow of War is Bao Ninh’s way of doing the same thing. The novel is an exercise in coming to terms with trauma—the trauma of killing and seeing others killed and almost being killed; of losing almost everyone and everything; of the hollow promises of a postwar world that proved false; of the deadening of the capacity to feel or hope; of the betrayal of ideology and History.
Those familiar with trauma studies are aware that trauma is a slippery thing to represent; as Andrew Ng notes in his illuminating article on The Sorrow of War and trauma, “a fundamental feature of trauma is the resistance to representation. This is not only because traumatic memory is often denied to the subject through the psychic mechanism of repression so that she may survive the event, but also because language is ultimately incapable of apprehending the magnitude of the experience.” The subject has trouble with the sense that they are “in-the-world” and the “state of privation produced by trauma…relegates memory of the experience to the unconscious and deprives the subject of the capacity to make sense of, and to articulate it.” Yet, Ng explains, while language certainly cannot be sufficient to articulate trauma, it can actually embody the event in its structure if not its meaning. Language can ultimately become a “means by which recuperation from trauma becomes possible.”
Ninh’s (and Kien’s) novel possesses the stylistic qualities that indicate a reckoning with trauma. There are “frequent and abrupt shifts between tenses,” with Kien writing in 1976, remembering 1965, jumping to when he is forty, etc. The narrative is thus fragmented and sometimes difficult to follow. There is no linear narrative and cause-and-effect is difficult to parse out. It is a “series of vignettes” more than anything else (but there is still an aim and direction). Kien sees his writing getting away from him sometimes, resisting his desires to impose order and to elide certain things and focus on others. Ninh writes, “the novel seemed to have its own logic, its own flow. It seemed from then on to structure itself, to tale its own time, to make its own detours” (88). At times, “more stories came back to him” as “flashes like film reels of events he had not thought of even once since they occurred” (100).
Kien is not able to dictate his own story’s parameters and content as he works through trauma through writing. The act “is now both a symptom of Kien’s trauma and a conduit through which it can resurface.” He often sees the novel as having a life of its own: his pen moving against his will, names and scenes coming back to him unbidden.
Kien is also dealing with what his “survivor’s mission” might be. He tells himself that he has a divine and sacred needed to write—that he must leave this manuscript to the world when he is done. It doesn’t seem like he truly considers himself some sort of saint whose mission is to save others like him, but it does seem like his reparation comes from “making trauma ‘thinkable,’” Ng notes. Kien gets to “insert his identity back into history.” There is an implicit audience here, though Kien does not need to publish his work in order to satisfy his mission.
