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
Kien is back in Hanoi now. It has been years since the war, but each day brings more memories of the horrific events Kien witnessed as a soldier. In a nightmare, for instance, he sees a pretty young woman he once knew named Hoa. He and Hoa knew each other in the Jungle of Screaming Souls in 1968. They only worked together for a short time, but he often has vivid nightmares in which he sees her lying helpless at the mercy of American soldiers. The soldiers rape her while Kien watches, but he’s powerless in the dream—he can’t even yell to her.
The novel hasn’t yet revealed the specific circumstances of Kien’s acquaintance with Hoa, but it’s clear that her ultimate demise at the hands of ruthless American soldiers still haunts Kien. Once again, he finds himself in a completely helpless position as he remembers the horrific things he has witnessed, knowing all the while that he can do nothing to change what happened.
Themes
Sometimes, when Kien walks down the streets in Hanoi, he will pass some rotting meat and suddenly find himself transported back to a battle site from 1972, when he was forced to walk over countless corpses and smell the “stench of death.” The memories are always right there, ready to spring up at him at a moment’s notice, like when he watches an American war movie and finds himself raring to jump into battle, feeling overcome by a horrific and murderous excitement. This, it seems, is all the war has left him with—it didn’t give him a beautiful, hopeful future, as he once thought it would. Instead, the promise of a gleaming new future was nothing but a lie. The truth is, the only beauty and hope in his life exist in “the beautiful prewar past.”
Now that he’s back from the war, Kien is seemingly just as skeptical as the truck driver was during their conversation in the Jungle of Screaming Souls—he doesn’t think there’s any promise of a glorious, wonderful future, despite the fact that the North won the Vietnam War. Rather, he tries to take comfort in his memories of prewar life in Vietnam, underscoring just how thoroughly the war upended his life.
Themes
Kien is almost 40 now, but he was only 17 when the fighting began in 1965. That means he was 27 when Saigon fell to the North. And then he spent time working with the Remains-Gathering Team, meaning that he lost nearly 14 years of his life to the war. He has little to show for all of his efforts. Still, he has been trying to write about it. He sits down each evening and tries to find the right headspace to write about his experiences, planning out how the plot should go and how his many stories should intersect. Once he starts writing, though, his plans fall apart. Immersing himself in his memories makes it impossible to write with the kind of coherency he originally had in mind.
Weighed down by traumatic memories, Kien starts writing as a way of coping with the horror he has witnessed. This is a productive way of channeling his trauma, but it also forces him to revisit some of the worst moments of his life. It’s no wonder, then, that the writing itself comes out jumbled and nonlinear, as he appears to let his emotions and memories guide the process instead of following a chronological timeline—a good illustration of how grief and trauma have their own internal logic, which doesn’t always make much sense from the outside.
Themes
It seems to Kien that he writes simply to “rid himself of his devils.” The process plunges him back into some of his worst memories, and he relives them in order to commit them to the page, creating an account of the war that feels oddly personal to him, as if the war itself was his own private experience. As the novel emerges, he realizes that it will be his final act as a soldier—it’s something he needs to do, feeling almost as if it’s his duty even though it pushes him to the brink of insanity. In fact, he has a secret suspicion that he’s been put on Earth to fulfill a “heavenly duty,” which is why he survived the war. And the novel, he thinks, will be the “earthly manifestation” of that “heavenly duty.”
The novel has already shown Kien’s pessimistic view of the present and the future, as well as his skepticism of the war. He no longer believes that the Vietnam War achieved what it was supposed to, and he has no hope that the future will bring the many things the war promised it would. He is, however, invested in the present in one very specific way: he cares about writing this novel about the Vietnam War, seeing it as an important thing to do. In fact, he believes it is his “duty” to write this book, indicating that he thinks society needs to know what the war was like from a soldier’s perspective. By investing himself in this belief, Kien ultimately invests himself in the present and the future, even if he otherwise feels jaded.
Themes
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Five years ago, Kien decided to revisit a small hamlet where his battalion had been based for training 20 years earlier. The place looked almost exactly the same, as if it had been perfectly preserved in time. But when he went to visit the older woman who had cared for the troops, he discovered that she had died. The old woman’s daughter, Lan, answered the door when Kien arrived and instantly remembered him, even recalling his nickname in the platoon: “Sorrowful Spirit.” She was only 13 back then, but she remembered the period very well. She took Kien to pray for her mother, who died after receiving the news that both her sons had been killed in the war.
There’s something inherently unsettling about returning to a place that looks familiar but has undergone so much change. The hamlet that Kien revisits doesn’t look like it has been ravaged by war and time, but almost everyone he knew who lived there has died. What’s more, Lan’s mother seemingly died as a direct result of the Vietnam War, since the news of her sons’ deaths ultimately killed her. And yet, the hamlet looks the same to Kien, easily transporting him back to the days he spent there—yet another illustration of how hard it is to move on in the aftermath of the war.
Themes
Kien looked down at a small grave, and Lan explained that it belonged to her infant son. Her husband was a soldier who also trained in the small hamlet. He was only there for a month, so they had to rush the wedding ceremony. He died in combat six months later, and Lan thought his death was the reason their baby didn’t survive, either. Her husband was part of the last group of soldiers to ever come through the hamlet. Of all the men that stayed there, though, Kien was the only one to ever have returned. Lan wanted to leave the hamlet, but she felt that she couldn’t leave behind her mother and son’s graves. Also, she felt like she was waiting for someone—perhaps, she said, she was waiting for Kien.
Lan lost a lot to the Vietnam War. Everyone she loved, in fact, ended up dying because of the war. Like Kien, then, she has trouble simply moving on in these postwar years, finding it difficult to start a new life instead of dwelling on the past, which is ultimately what she does by continuing to live in the hamlet.
Themes
Lan ran her hand over Kien’s shoulder and told him to forget about her and to live a good life. However, she also said that if he ever stopped wandering and had nowhere to go, he should return to her in the small hamlet. She would always be there for him, should he ever want to be with her. Years later, Kien happened to drive near the hamlet while on assignment with some fellow journalists. Looking up at the hills, he remembered Lan’s words and thought fondly of her kind offer as the car kept driving.
Lan’s offer suggests that she sees Kien as a kindred soul—after all, both of their lives have been ravaged by the war, and both of them find it difficult to move on. And yet, returning to the hamlet and living with Lan would, in some ways, force Kien to dwell in the past to an even greater extent, since he originally met Lan when he was staying on her property with the rest of his unit at the beginning of the war. To return, then, would be to return to a place laden with memories.
Themes
