The Sorrow of War Essay -- Literary Analysis, Bao Ninh

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting. Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War tells a very realistic and explicit story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier and writer, during the Vietnam War. Kien manages to survive, usually by luck, through battles and situations in which survival seems futile. When Kien’s entire platoon is killed in battle, he is one of the few to survive. This seems to be a blessing and a curse as Kien had â€Å"perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any other contemporary writer† (Ninh, 89). As one can imagine, Kien is haunted daily by gruesome hallucinations and memories from the battlefield. Kien begins to write about his war experiences, which turns into an obsession. He claims it is obligated as his duty to write about the war, and yet â€Å"seems to write only to rid himself of his devils† (Ninh, 49). His motivation is to â€Å"expose the realities of war and the tear aside conventional images† (Ninh, 50). It is not just Kien whose life is destroyed by the war. Kien tells of a driver Vuong who, before the war, drank very little and was kind a timid. Vuong disappears for many months and when he returns his life has collapsed. â€Å"I’ve given up driving, fellas. Now alcohol drives me,† Voung states (Ninh, 152). Kien tou... ...hard times together and we reunited multiple times. Cross and Martha, however, were distant apart for the duration of the war. Cross’s deep love for Martha stemmed from his obsessive longing to be with her and to be loved back by her. Cross eventually concedes that Martha belongs to another world and would never love him (Obrien, 17). The two novels use love as a strong metaphor for the losses of war. Ninh often explicitly states that both Kien and every other solider would be forever warped due to the senseless cruelties witness in the long conflict. Kien’s deep love for Phuong is destroyed by the war, as is Lieutenant Cross’s love for Martha. This paralleled metaphor speaks for both sides of the war and the suffering endured by all involved. The tragic loss of love and innocence illustrates the destruction the Vietnam War had on both veterans and society.