“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.
claire, I agree with you when you say that the war destroyed Kien and stopped him from ever having a relationship with Phuong and with anyone else for that matter. The war turned him into a fighting machine and he was apart of that world for so long that it's no wonder that when he finally got back home after the war that he couldn't bring himself to fit back into a normal, peaceful society. He couldn't do it because it was so hard for him to get out of the fighting mentality that he was apart of for most of his life. Turning that part off of himself wasn't easy and that pushed people away from him, making him more isolated and alienated from not only himself, but society around him, as well.
ReplyDelete--Paula Martin
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ReplyDeleteGreat post Claire! I agree that Kien has remained in the soldier role even after the war. What we basically know of Kien is that as a soldier, he had a clear-cut role and purpose, and that's to survive and win. And it definitely has carried over into his post-war life, affecting his life in a negative way. For him to shed that soldier role would mean he would no longer have a purpose and, most importantly, his ideal love of Phuong would disappear. It does seem that violence is the only thing he knows and the only thing he is sure of.
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Wonderful commentary! As the novel progresses, we see a lot of seemingly disparate elements that are difficult at times to sort through and extract meaning from, but I really liked your connection of Kien's military service with his perpetual inability to reintegrate himself back into society. Love and war are tied together very closely in the novel and you do a good job of illustrating this clearly through a specific episode, which is the best way to understanding the methods of Kien's/Ninh's madness. :-)
ReplyDelete-Tim J.