38 pages • 1 hour read
Thu Huong DuongNovel Without a Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Quan’s Mother Giving Birth to His Brother
In the first section of Novel Without a Name, during the first instance of analepsis (denoted via italics), Quan recalls in great detail his brother’s birth. He describes his mother’s pain, his fear, and finally his little brother’s “little hands” and “little reddened feet” (14). Quan’s mother giving birth and the image of his brother as a tiny, red being in a basin becomes a recurring symbol in the novel. Quan’s vision comes back to him in force when he visits home and learns that his brother was killed. He thinks, “My mother’s horrific childbirth cry pierced through me. An earthenware basin. Water splashing. Two little red legs that kicked and kicked…Why was he kicking?” (120). Quan cannot reconcile his vision of his brother as a new person, fighting for life, with his death, which arrives for no good reason.
From then on, Quan is struck by the same vision of his mother’s pain and his brother kicking in a bowl when Quan has moments of distress or doubt. As Quan’s internal journey continues, his dreams of that moment twist and become more macabre, to the point where he dreams of his mother attempting to nurse his dead brother’s skeleton. Quan’s visions of his brother in the bowl occur more and more frequently as his thinking becomes more fragmented and whatever remaining beliefs he has in Marxist ideology shatter.
The Colors Red and White
As is the case in many Eastern cultures, in Vietnamese culture, red is a symbol of luck and happiness and white is a symbol of purity and death. Often, brides wear red for weddings and mourners wear white at funerals. While Huong uses several colors frequently (such as green to describe the jungle), she uses red and white the most. When describing death, Huong almost always describes bodies in terms of their whiteness, whether they are skeletons or fresher corpses.
While there are numerous examples of red appearing in the text, one particularly noteworthy instance is the following description of an area Quan passes through on the way to Zone K: “Then nothing but sand as red as blood all the way to the horizon. A savage expanse of scarlet sand. A desert of congealed blood. The dawn was flushed red…” (70). Red appears as a descriptor consistently and frequently in the novel, and serves as a symbol on multiple levels: first the traditional Vietnamese belief that red symbolizes joy, second as the color of blood, and third as the color historically most associated with Communism.
The Constant Presence of and Yearning for Death
War and death go hand in hand. Like the novel’s theme of lost innocence, the constant reminder of death on both large and small scales is common to novels depicting the experience of being a soldier. On a more macro scale, Quan and his fellow soldiers hear of and personally experience having entire platoons wiped out in a single battle. Quan’s own unit is destroyed twice during the course of the novel, and his platoon-mate Thai’s younger brother dies in a unit that is wiped out completely, save for one man. Describing his worst and darkest memory, Quan remembers his unit killing quite a few soldiers in a friendly-fire incident.
More personally, Quan sees friends die, and comes across mutilated corpses and skeletons regularly. While he does feel bad for them, he cannot allow himself to feel too deeply or he would be unable to continue with his job as a soldier. He and his fellow soldiers experience numbness in the face of death; further, being so close to death so often gives many of them a death wish. Some soldiers are simply willing to die for the cause they believe in (or have been indoctrinated into), while others feel drawn to death because of their intimate relationship with it.
Descriptions of Food
In nearly every part of Quan’s journey, Huong describes food, or characters talk about food. Very early in Novel Without a Name, Quan describes his unit’s food situation: “For a long time we had lived on nothing but dried shrimp boiled with a few wild vegetables and lichen we scraped off rocks” (16). Luy’s longing for better and more food is juxtaposed with this description. He says, “Ah, if I could just once eat my fill. A huge pot of sticky rice and a big braised ham hock. Or a big plate of rice noodles with lemon-and-shrimp sauce” (16). Many of Huong’s character descriptions include notes about how much food a particular person can eat or the food for which they have a particular longing. Starvation and lack of access to quality food are common problems for soldiers embroiled in long-term wars, and as food is an essential part of most cultures, they naturally think of what they miss while deprived of it. Food gives people a way to relate to each other even in terrible situations, and brings to mind cultural absence in the face of armed conflict.
