The Second Narrator Character Analysis

A second narrative voice enters the novel in the final pages of the book. This secondary voice belongs to a former soldier whose path briefly intersected with Kien’s at the very beginning of the war. After the war, he often saw Kien walking around Hanoi and knew that he was a reclusive writer. When Kien finished his novel and left his apartment once and for all, the second narrator eventually came into possession of the unfinished manuscript and was drawn in by Kien’s writing. He ultimately decided to compile the many stories and try to organize them in a way that made sense, presenting the book as a jumbled and fragmentary collection of tales about war, loss, and love.