56 pages • 1 hour read
Bảo NinhThe Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Kien
Kien is the main character of the novel. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, he is haunted by the fighting. To cope with his memories, he writes a novel, returning again and again to the places where his friends died, to a time before Phuong, his teenage sweetheart, left him, and to the aftermath of the war. When the novel opens, Kien is part of a team recovering bodies from the Vietnamese jungles a year after the war, returning to his past.
He never gets clear of the memories. Later, the reader learns that Kien is forty, and the war has been over for fourteen years. The reader also learns Kien is writing a novel about his experiences during the war. He calls the novel his sacred duty. He wants to tell his story of the war, but in reality, he is telling the story of all of Vietnam, especially the north. He describes the sorrow of soldiers in the aftermath of war, and the sorrow of Vietnam.
He describes his sorrow as well, beginning with his return to the jungle and the memories of war, through his last good memories with Phuong before the war began, and to his own drunkenness and sorrow years after the war. He describes, through the stories of everyone he knew affected by the war, his own sorrows—the sorrow in the aftermath becomes the main theme, and title, of the novel. He circles back again and again to his last days with Phuong before the war, and to women who remind him of her; he returns again and again to the Jungle of Screaming Souls where so many of his fellow soldiers fell; and he returns often to Hanoi, in the days during and after the war: the blackouts, the people hurrying along, trying to mend their lives, the falling rain.
Kien also serves as an alter ego to the author. Bao Ninh was also a soldier, in the same regiment as his character, Kien. He experienced the same loss—almost all of his regiment—that Kien did. Kien is writing a novel of his experience fourteen years after the war. Bao Ninh writes a novel fourteen years after the war ends. Kien then serves as a fictional version of Bao, allowing Bao to tell a true story of war through the eyes of a fictional character.
Phuong
Phuong was Kien’s childhood sweetheart. They lived near each other, went to school together, and loved one another, despite the Communist Party’s “Three Don’ts,” which forbade sex, love, or marriage among the young. Before the war, she is described as a beautiful young girl, full of life, unafraid. She travels with Kien south, into the war zone. She wants Kien to make love to her before he leaves. The last happy moments in Kien’s life before the war begins are with Phuong: the day they skip school and go swimming; the trip south on the freight train, after Kien finishes his training.
Phuong’s place in Kien’s life is a reminder of what he has lost. Before the war, he remembers his perfect days with her; after the war, Phuong has become a prostitute. She is as sorrowful as Kien in her own way. The war took their love from them by separating them, by forcing them both to do what they had to do to survive, and by altering them so they cannot stay together after the war is over. Both of them have seen and done too many things for their love—once the innocent and pure love of youth—to remain as it was, and so they are forced to leave one another and remain locked in their own sorrows.
Kien’s Father
Kien’s father is one of the few characters representing the older generation of Vietnam. Like Kien, he was sorrowful before the novel begins, but while Kien was sorrowful because of the war, his father was sorrowful because of the Communist Party: “It was rumored he had been criticized by the Party members and had been dismissed and was regarded as a suspicious malcontent, a rightist deviationist” (124).
After his dismissal from the Party, his health declined; he began drinking heavily, confining himself to his quarters to work on his paintings. In this, he is much like Kien becomes after the war: Kien is also devastated by his sorrows, confining himself to his quarters and drinking heavily. Kien’s father represents the first wave of sorrows caused by the Communist Party: “His paintings had been criticized because his work was seen to be alien to the working-class understanding of art” (125). The Communist Party promotes the “Three Alerts,” or readiness for war, the “Three Responsibilities,” which are responsibilities to the state, and the “Three Don’ts” which forbid sex, love, or marriage among the young. Kien’s father, before the Party changed life in Vietnam, looked forward to spring, and its representation of hope, but after being dismissed from the party, and after his work is dismissed by the party, he gives up hope and his health fails. He burns his paintings in the same way Kien says his manuscript is “the ash from this exorcism of devils” (114), meaning he had poured all his sorrow into his work and all that was left was the ash.
