Sam's Journal Entry

In the sections where Kien talks about his experiences in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, it seems that the jungle is a direct reflection of Kien's thoughts and overall mental state. The jungle is a real place with gloomy days and rainy nights. It is a place outside the comforts of civilization, and it encases fear and pain and a sense of loneliness. Inside the jungle, Kien is held a prisoner from the outside world and suffers because of it. The jungle is haunted by lost souls of soldiers and devils that will not leave to the "Other World." Like the jungle, Kien's thoughts are full of memories that will not leave and threaten to keep him trapped. Post-war, Kien secludes himself and keeps himself hidden from those around. He succumbs to loneliness letting the pain form like rainclouds in the jungle. He seems to have become a human manifestation of the jungle he so desperately wanted to get out of.

Paul's Journal Entry

Community Ties


On pages 60 - 65 in the novel, Ninh talks about the community that Kien returns to.  In his hometown of Hanoi, everyone seems to know each other.  There is much gossip that goes around and seems to be that nothing can stay hidden among the townsfolk.  Growing up as a Vietnamese American, I was never privileged enough to experience that type of community in Vietnam.  Ironically I was able to grow up with that experience here with my family.  What I've learned is that when a Vietnamese person hangs out with another Vietnamese person, all we do is gossip about everyone else we know.  It may be rude to some and outrageous to others but it has been show that Vietnamese people accept that because we don't "trash talk" instead we use complete and utter brutal truth.  This is what I call "The Truth".  Kien's community clearly is a nosy lot, however it so shows that these people no matter how many bad things can be said, they care for one another's well being and future.  Not once in the passages did the neighbors really badmouth each other, in fact all they spoke about was "The Truth".  Kien's neighbors knew all about each other, they knew who was interested in whom or what was going on with her/him.  Kien returns disconnected with his community, he seems as though he can not relate to him because they did not experience what he did.  It can be assumed that had Kien opened up with the community he would not have resorted to writing and drinking as a means of escape.  The best example is that throughout the book Kien respected his fellow soldiers and even named things after them i.e. the pack of card. Kien was not driven away from the idea of community, but driven away of developing a community with people who knew would not understand his sorrow.

Alex's Journal

"With canina one smoked to forget the daily hell of the soldier's life, smoked to forget hunger and suffering."

     This passage stood out to me because it shows the stress that the war caused them. There was constant physical and mental stress brought upon them. Canina was a type of escape from it all. They would sit around together and dream about whatever made them happy. Many soldiers dreamt about family, while others dreamt about food or women. It was their own oasis away from all of the chaos. A time to let go of all the fear and anxiety, allowing them to travel to a place of personal bliss. There was the constant fear of losing one's life at any moment. That is a tremendously large stress to carry. They needed escapes like these in order to get some sense of peace. They also got a sense of happiness when they were together hanging out and playing cards. They went through and saw so much that even the smallest escape from reality got them through their days. It is heartbreaking to see all that soldier's endure, and their longing for their families and relationships at home. It shows the bravery and courage that soldiers exemplify.

Jason's Journal Entry

Ghosts play an integral part in Kien's life and he is constantly haunted by ghosts of his past. It seems to me that Kien feels some sort of strange peace and reconciliation as he is visited by the ghosts of his fallen comrades. Also, it is strange and unsettling how Kien lives in his past and how he almost exclusively communicates with his ghosts. The ghosts seem to represent Kien's life and lively hood as he appears to be more lively, his descriptions become more lucid, and he seems to stop wandering as he sees and experiences his ghosts. Additionally, Kien's ghosts appear to be representative of life and a driving force as they compel Kien to write his war stories. There is even evidence that they may actually be taking over Kien and his pen because he is described as writing his memoirs in a "mechanical" fashion.

Sapna'a Journal Entry

Kien can't seem to stop writing and seems to be controlled by it. In this drawing, there is an outline of a man, which represents Kien and his inability to control his thoughts and memories as they flow out. The table and empty chair represent the writing of Kien's novel being crafted seemingly on its own. His need to write is almost guided by a subconscious force. The dark colors surrounding the table represent all of Kien's memories--mostly bad and traumatic ones. However, there is some light green to show some lighthearted and good memories he has lingering. While writing is the guiding force in Kien's life because it's his way to deal with his experiences and trauma, it takes on a life of its own. 

Fariba's Journal Entry

This drawing is a representation of what the main character Kien sees in the small mirror on page 70 of Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War. Kien explains that he is astonished by seeing his reflection. I chose to draw this picture because it represents the physical changes caused by the war on Kien and how he cannot bear to look at himself in the face. His reflection shows greyed hair, wrinkles and circles under his eyes. These physical attributes were more likely brought on by no sleep, excessive stress and other physical and mental hardships of the war. The mental hardships Kien endured, such as the horrible memory of his love Phuong's rape, caused him to drink himself into a drunkard state of being.

Ace's Journal Entry

For my sketch, I decided to draw the woods and rain to represent nature. In the book so far, there seems to be a strong respect for nature, even to the point where nature is given a name like the Jungle of Screaming Souls. It combines both supernatural and natural elements in that Kien and the other soldiers say that it contains ghosts and the "Forest Man" (p. 96-97). It is in the Jungle of Screaming Souls where most of Kien's battalion has been killed and where he has to go to perform his duty as the leader of the Remains-Gathering Team. Because most of his experiences are in these woods, they also serve as his inspiration to write his book.

Claire's Journal Entry

“It had ended recently, abruptly, after a fight outside a tavern where Kien had beaten up Phuong’s former lover, mauling him badly.  The police had been called and Kien had been described by witnesses as a ‘madman.’ He had returned home from the police station and met Phuong.  He was speechless and distraught” (Ninh 84).

Kien has survived the brutality of war. Through the ten long years he served his country he was groomed to kill and injure the enemy by any means possible.  I feel like the above quote is very significant in the work so far because it shows the inability of Kien as a soldier to cope and assimilate himself back into civilization as a normal civilian.  He is unable to leave behind his role of a soldier—it is part of his identity now. He sees Phuong’s former lover as an enemy, a man he must injure and destroy as best possible. He resorts to violence, the only mode he has been trained to deal with enemies.  In this passage, Kien returns to his former way of living as a military man, though the war is over and done.  He is unable to understand his true motives for his actions as he returns to Phuong “speechless and distraught.”  It is as if when he sees the gentleman, Kien returns to auto pilot seeking justice.  It would likewise appear that he is unable to stop himself and once he has done the damage, it is only then he realizes what he has done and is distraught at who he has become.   I believe this realization is the reason that he is unable to stay with Phuong and does not stop her from leaving him.  Through this event, Kien realizes that being a soldier has caused hurt to many people and he is unable to have a healthy relationship with anyone since he cannot rid himself of his former days in the military. 

Amanda's Journal Entry

Quotation:

“If you can’t identify them by name we’ll be burdened by their deaths for the rest of our lives,” the head of the MIA team had said. He had been an insurance clerk at one time. Now his entire life was gathering corpses. He was preoccupied with this sole duty, which was to locate, identify, recover, then bury the dead soldiers. He used to describe his work as though it were a sacred oath, and as others to swear their dedication. (91-2)

Response:

Throughout this novel the dead constantly confront the living, and the living, in turn, are always busy with the dead. There’s a need for closure – burying the dead properly might not be much, but it’s all that can be done. Soldiers’ belongings are returned to loved ones and teams struggle to locate and properly bury the many bodies scattered across the battle zones. Some people, such as the man mentioned in the passage above, have devoted themselves to the dead: pledged their lives to serve the dead. Constantly confronted by bodies and death, it seems that they will never really be able to move on. Burial is supposed to bring an end to the issue, to bring closure, but it doesn’t seem to help Kien fight his demons. It’s not that the dead should not be properly buried (Kien agrees that they should shortly after the above passage), but to think that proper burials will set the souls of the living at ease is not correct. It’s a beginning, perhaps, but as the novel proves, the surviving soldiers have layers of suffering that all need closure, and not all their problems can be so simply solved. Some things cannot be so “easily” dealt with: memories that are buried will only resurface with vehemence. The living are consumed by caring for the dead, remembering the dead, and dealing with the fact that they have caused death as well. No wonder Kien has a hard time relating to other people – he’s had to experience things not many others have, and he’s had to continue living among people who cannot possibly understand what he suffers. And yet there’s really nothing else Kien can do – those who have died have died precisely to provide Kien and other the opportunity to live, and yet the chance of Kien and others like him being able to reintegrate with society is very slim. The surviving soldiers are closer to the deceased soldiers than they are to civilians. 

Paula's Journal Entry

 

Quote:

“So this is what the peace and happiness would be! The glorious, bright rays of victory, his grand, long-awaited return. So much for his naive faith in the future. He swore: “Wretched man that I am!” (pg. 83)

Response:

            This is the one thing that Kien was so upset about and hurt about after coming back from the war after 10 long years. It was because he had dreamt for so long to be back together with Phuong, the love of his life, thinking that he could magically start his life together with her when he got back from the war. However, being gone for so long, he missed his chance with Phuong, which he didn’t want to realize until it was too late. He wanted to believe that he could start a fresh new life and be happy after the war, so much that it clouded his judgment, thus resulting in his heart being broken. Kien only ever feels so much self-pity for himself in these types of situations that he beats himself up about it all, thinking it was so naïve of him to do such a thing to himself.

            However, thinking about seeing Phuong again is part of what lifted his spirits during the war. It gave him a reason to keep fighting, so he could go back home to her, but Kien never saw her that way. All Phuong was to him before the war was peace, harmony, and happiness, so he kept that image of her with him during the war. That is what gave him hope and strength. However, the moment she betrayed him it destroyed that for him forever and it was all because of the war. This part is significant because it’s the moment when Kien loses hope in himself and where he starts being so much more sad, lonely, meaningless, and self-destructive again.

The color gray that surrounds the country represents the terrible atmosphere created by the Vietnam War, in and around neighboring countries. The Country of Vietnam itself was left white. White represents purity, peace, the end of the war, and the unification that was reached between both sides. 

Ruben S.

Song of Memories and Death - Tim J.

In every reading I do, I always find one passage or even one sentence that acts as a mechanism for unlocking the text; everything that comes before is culminated in that passage, and all that follows can be more fully understood by the interpretive light shed upon it by this crucial part in the book.

In Bao Ninh's novel, this passage occurs on pg. 82 (of my edition) upon the sentence that begins with "Kien had perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any contemporary writer," finding its individual realization in the paragraph that ends with "For every unknown soldier, for every collection of MIA remains, there was a story" (83). Ninh addresses nearly every key issue of the novel in this passage, illustrating the visceral horrors of warfare and its human cost physically and mentally through a lens of literacy. Kien describes the nature of the deaths he has witnessed through images of shapes and colours, which furthers the atmospheric tension in the novel between the realities of the Vietnam War and Kien's persistent struggle to define them in a way that is respectful of the dead and fallen through its characteristics of high literary art.

At this point in the novel, Kien still wrestles internally with how to embody his experiences in writing, but he encounters an image of a burial of the dead that seems to give him a vague epiphanical direction to his musings, for his narration explaining the end of a mysterious forest song after burying the bones of a corpse found with a guitar illustrate to him that the presence and dominion of death should not signify the silence of the storyteller, but rather amplify the significance of the message.

Every soldier is said to have heard a different version of the song, and this can be taken to mean that Kien should employ his vast memories of death to reach a great amount of readers through the structuring of the inevitability of death and war into the beauty of literature.

Furthermore, through the alignment of death and nature, Ninh is possibly addressing the necessity of death in understanding the crucial foundations of artistic and literary symmetry; without opposites, a creative process cannot occur. Without death, a writer cannot write about the emotions and ordering of human existence around the indifferent world. Ninh states that "the yarn became folklore" (83), emphasizing that death transforms naturally into the consciousness of a community and humanity itself, and Kien begins to understand this as he witnesses death singing of its memories.

-Tim J.

Sorrow of War journal entry--Kathy

     On page 54, Lan says to Kien, "So that's the short story of my life. First my brothers, then my mother, then my husband, then my son. No wonder I feel a little weaker every year. I live in this shell of loneliness, going from house to hill, hill to house, and around the hamlet, with no one paying any attention to me and me not noticing others." 

     This exemplifies the theme of isolation that we see not only in this novel (The Sorrow of War) but also in Enemies, A Love Story and to a certain extent, in Survival in Auschwitz. This seems to be a crucial element in understanding exile or war-based texts. All of our main characters so far (Levi, Herman, and Kien) exhibit signs of reactionary isolation in addition to self-imposed isolation. The character of Lan is also a perfect example of one who has been both forgotten/left behind by her family/community yet has resolved to stay in exile (arguably) by choice. One must question if maybe isolation is just an inevitable part of post-trauma life that can sometimes be managed but never actually avoided.

--Kathy