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.
Themes
Memory
The Sorrow of War is in part a novel about memory. Kien believes it is his sacred duty to tell the story of the Vietnam War, but what he means is that he wants to tell the stories of the people affected by it. By doing so, he keeps them alive:
There was still too much to do. He had the burden of his generation, a debt to repay before dying. It would be tragic and unjust in the extreme if he were to pass away, to be buried deep in the wet earth, carrying with him the history of his generation (122).
Kien must finish his novel, because through the novel, and the memories he captures in it, his friends continue to live: “The personalities, both alive and dead, breathed and spoke to the author in his special world where everyone he had known still lived and walked and smiled and ate and joked and dreamed and loved” (109).
The novel is built around memory. There is very little forward progress in it. Kien is around forty when he is writing it, and he is around forty when he finishes. The rest is memory: his days in the war; his days before the war, when he was happy; and his unhappiness after the war. There is little chronological order in the novel. Rather, it is presented in the same way memory works: roundabout, associative, and often jumbled.
The novel is also the memory of the author, Bao Ninh. At the end of the novel, he presents himself as a character in Kien’s novel, saying he only edited it and readied it for publication. The truth is Kien is a character in Ninh’s novel, a representation of himself, with all his memories and sorrows, though in the end both the author and his character find some solace in memory:
His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of war (233).
Only by returning to memory can he overcome the sorrows of war and find solace—not in the present, but by being taken “from the terrible present back to the happy days of the past” (227).
Art
Kien is writing a novel. Phuong once played the piano. Kien’s father was a painter. But Phuong and Kien’s father both become disillusioned with art. Phuong quits playing the piano when the war begins. Kien’s father burns his paintings. They both conclude that their art is lost in wartime.
Kien continues with his art. He says he has a sacred duty to finish his novel, but when he finishes, he doesn’t try to publish it. He decides that he has done his duty by remembering Phuong, and all the others who sacrificed themselves during the war:
But for Hoa and countless other loved comrades, nameless ordinary soldiers, those who sacrificed for others and for their Vietnam, raising the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict, the war would been another brutal, sadistic exercise (192).
Only Bao Ninh, the author, keeps his art. He “arranges” Kien’s novel and publishes it, because he believes that there is value in remembering the past. That art has value in that it can remind us of the sorrows and sacrifices those around us have made, and allow us to, eventually, remember them without the sorrow.
