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 44-76Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 44-76 Summary
In his room in Hanoi, Kien reveals that he is not in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, but rather remembering it almost fourteen years after the war. He reveals that at times unbidden memories will come to him: smelling rotting meat and remembering the decomposing bodies on Hamburger Hill; lying in bed, listening to the ceiling fan, and remembering the sound of helicopter blades; or watching war movies and feeling a rush of adrenaline, a desire to fight again.
Kien also reveals he is almost forty, and writing a novel about his experiences during the war. He has the idea that he has been chosen to perform the sacred duty of writing about the war. He believes he has been kept alive through the war years to perform this duty.
As Kien contemplates his novel in his room, he begins to remember the years after the war. Almost five years ago, he visited the tiny hamlet of Doi Mo, where he had first trained, before the war began. There, he meets the daughter of the woman he stayed with. After spending the night with her, she tells him he can always return to live with her. He remembers visiting his mother’s second husband just before Kien left for the war, and returning after the war to find his step-father dead. He thinks of writing stories about the lives of the people in the building where he lives now in Hanoi. He remembers Hanh, a girl slightly older than him who wanted to tell him something important, but he was too afraid to listen to her. He remembers a false spring, and how Phuong, his childhood sweetheart, left him just after it ended. In his sorrow he begins to drink, and one night while out drinking he saves a young prostitute from being harmed by another man. After taking her back to his apartment, he realizes she is the younger sister of Vinh, who served with Kien and died on the M’Drac battlefield.
Kien also realizes he is at a stage in which he does not know what to do with his life. Still haunted by the war, the city is coming alive with the threat of another war on the horizon, this one with China. And it is during that spring that something moves inside Kien to bring him, finally, peace.
Pages 44-76 Analysis
While the first forty-four pages of the novel circle back to the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the next thirty pages reveal that Kien is almost forty, and that the war has been over for fourteen years. As Kien is in his room, writing his novel, it becomes clear that the non-linear storyline the novel has followed so far is because Kien’s writing keeps betraying him: “He lays the design out in his mind before taking up his pen. 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” (48).
In pages 44-76, Kien describes his life after the war—his writing, his wandering around, his revisiting people he knew before the war began—but, again, there is no chronological order. His memories are jumbled. He often begins a new storyline with no context of time or place, except to say whether it was before or after the war. He mentions writing about the lives of the people in the apartment building around him: “He could, for example, write a novel about his neighbors above, below, and on the same floor as his own apartment in the one building. It could be a story of symphonies. Not a war story” (60).
Kien does tell a few of these stories, but after only a few pages, he’s back to relating each story to the war. When he tells of Hanh, he says she was gone when he visited Hanoi briefly before being shipped off to war. He knows the prostitute because her brother died in the war. Even years later, all of his stories circle back to the war, because he hasn’t yet gotten it out of him. Kien says he meant the novel he is writing to be a post-war plot, but “each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war” (57).
