Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sorrow of War, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Trauma, and Moving On
Love in Times of Hardship
Coping Through Writing
Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Skepticism
Summary
Analysis
The next time Kien received news of Phuong was in a letter from another soldier. It was 1973, and a soldier named Ky wrote to him. Ky and Kien had fought together, but he didn’t tell him at the time that their paths had crossed before: Ky was one of the soldiers whom Kien had approached on that fateful day in the school while looking for Phuong. In his letter, Ky expressed regret that the other men teased Kien by making up a story about Phuong. The truth was, Phuong returned shortly after Kien stormed off, and she went around the entire compound asking where he had gone. She didn’t give up looking for him for a long time—so long that Ky eventually had to persuade her to come back into the classroom. He had easily recognized how in love Phuong was with Kien.
Only two years before the end of the war, Kien finally finds out more about the last time he saw Phuong. What’s remarkable isn’t necessarily just that Phuong tried so hard to find him, but that Ky was so moved by the love she had for Kien that he has now gone out of his way to write this letter. This is yet another sign that love can have a profound impact on people in even the most unlikely circumstances.
Themes
The next day, Ky and his unit had to leave, but Phuong wouldn’t go with them, saying instead that she might go south and join the Volunteer Youth Brigade. In his letter to Kien, Ky said he hoped Kien had already reunited with Phuong. If not, he wanted to pass along this information about her. Signing off, he told Kien to reunite with Phuong when the war was over.
Phuong’s love for and devotion to Kien made a last impact on Ky, moving him to write to Kien many years later to make sure the two lovers had a good chance of finding each other in postwar Vietnam. Once again, then, the novel highlights the ways in which love is capable of flourishing in unlikely moments.
Themes
It has now been years since the war ended. Kien often finds himself in horrible fits of despair, but he’s comforted by one thing: the past. Things might not have worked out with Phuong after the war, but he will always cling to the beauty of their youthful, prewar love. For him, any promise of happiness or love now lies in the past—that’s how he will move through the future, always looking back to the precious days of his life before the war.
Again, the novel suggests that past periods of happiness aren’t worth grieving over, since they still happened. It’s not the case that Kien managed to find happiness in postwar Vietnam, but it is the case that he experienced romantic bliss before becoming a soldier, meaning that he can always take comfort in his memories of this idyllic time.
Themes
