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.
Pages 200-233Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 200-233 Summary
On another night when he can’t sleep, Kien thinks of Phuong playing the piano. Her mother raised her to be a pianist, but Phuong quit playing. Kien says the war would have taken her music from her anyway. After listening to her play, he feels a harsh and cruel wind blow across their world, and this takes him back to the night on the train. When he finds Phuong again on the train, she has been raped multiple times. A big sailor, one of the men who raped her, tries to keep her with him so he can rape her again. Kien fights with the man, eventually finding an iron pipe and brutally murdering the man. As American planes attack, he takes Phuong away with him. They run from the exploding bombs as the fighters strafe the trains. Phuong is bleeding and unresponsive, in shock from the rape and murder. After stealing a bicycle which they later sell for food, Kien and Phuong take shelter in an abandoned school. Phuong turns angry and sarcastic, no longer seeming pure and innocent, accepting her new role as rape survivor. Kien gets her to sleep, but when he wakes up hours later, she is gone. While searching for her, a group of soldiers tells Kien she is having sex with the truck drivers. Kien searches for her in the trucks. He does not know if he believes the soldiers, but after everything that has happened to the two of them, he thinks it possible that the war has already ruined their lives. He sees Phuong bathing, and her bold display of her nakedness makes him believe everything the soldiers told him was true. He raises the gun to his head to commit suicide, but before he pulls the trigger he hears Phuong calling for him. In the dark, she walks right past him. Kien does not call to her, and instead walks away from her.
Years later, he receives a letter from one of the soldier saying they lied about her sleeping with the truck drivers. She was pure and innocent, he writes, and would not leave Kien. With this, Kien feels a sense of peace—as long as he can live in the past, with Phuong, remembering those bright days before the war, the sense of love and adventure, he can remain happy.
In the last pages of the book, the actual author of The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh, says he found Kien’s manuscript. He says the pages were jumbled—any page could be the first or last. They were all out of chronological order. As he read, he saw similarities between himself and Kien. Finally, he realizes he knew Kien. But their experiences after the war were different—the author found peace in his memories, and he hopes somehow that Kien will, too.
Pages 200-233 Analysis
The last thirty pages tell the true story of the beginning of the war. Before Kien even reaches his military unit, his love is raped, and he murders another Vietnamese soldier who raped Phuong. His country is torn apart by bombs, and fellow soldiers lie to him, saying Phuong is a whore. The author is telling the reader that this is what war, especially civil war, is. Kien kills another Vietnamese, much as north and south Vietnamese will soon be killing each other. Women will be raped, the countryside will be torn apart, travel will cease, men will lie and steal, and all of them will be forever changed by the war.
In the last few pages, the author, Bao Ninh, says he finds Kien’s manuscript. He introduces himself as a character in the novel to explain the structure of the novel, but also to show how similar his experiences were. He is again exploring the difference between fiction and nonfiction, legitimizing but also fictionalizing his war experiences. He does this for two reasons. The first is to say that any memory of war will be fictionalized: the chronology will be out of sync, the acts will be embellished, and the truth, however true the author might want it to be, will only be true for the author. He also wants to end with a coda, or postscript. He says that he has found peace through the writing of his novel. He hopes that Kien can, too, by remembering the peaceful past. By Kien, he means all soldiers who experienced the sorrows of war.
