The Jungle of Screaming Souls Symbol Analysis

The Jungle of Screaming Souls—where Kien is sent at the end of the Vietnam War to retrieve the corpses of missing soldiers—symbolizes the ways in which trauma and grief often lurk beneath the surface of life. The corpses themselves have sunk into the mud of the jungle, making them very difficult to find. In a way, then, it almost seems as if nothing tragic took place in the area. And yet, it’s Kien’s job to excavate the many bodies so that they aren’t forgotten, a task he comes to see as his “heavenly duty.” This “heavenly duty” isn’t just to drag bodies out of the mud: it’s to ensure that history bears witness to the atrocities that happened during the war. In the same way that the Jungle of Screaming Souls is full of ghosts and bodies despite looking completely unassuming, everyday life in Vietnam eventually resumes as if nothing happened. This discrepancy between the horror of what happened during the war and society’s odd sense of normalcy rankles Kien, ultimately driving him to write about his experiences in the war. In doing so, he essentially excavates the bitter reality of the war from society’s forgetful collective consciousness, dragging it out of obscurity in the same way that he once dragged corpses from the mud. In turn, the Jungle of Screaming Souls comes to represent how quickly and easily even the most monumental tragedies can fade away—unless, that is, people make the effort to keep the memory of such events alive.