38 pages • 1 hour read
Novel Without a Name
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Pages 73-106Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 73-106 Summary
Quan arrives at Zone K only to find that the general and political commissar he was meant to meet are no longer there. Instead, he meets Commander Dao Tien, who tows the Party line, much to Quan's displeasure. Quan and Dao Tien argue about Marxism and what purpose it serves. As with his refusal of Vieng’s advances, Quan questions his own motives in deliberately antagonizing someone who is ultimately only trying to help him in getting to where he’s trying to go. While talking, Quan realizes that Dao Tien’s younger brother was a member of a unit that Quan’s unit attacked by mistake, thinking they were the enemy; he refers to it as “the darkest of all [his] memories” (83).
Dao Tien takes Quan to where Bien, his childhood friend, is held. Bien is unwashed, injured, and spouts nonsense. Dao Tien tries to convince Quan that madness must be hereditary in Bien’s family or came from being kicked in the head by a cow. Once again, Quan dives into his memories and recalls Bien as a boy, and the experiences they had to together, along with remembrances of Bien’s family.
The next day, Quan meets Bien alone and determines that Bien’s madness is a ruse. He takes Bien to wash and to continue pretending to be insane. Quan manages to convince Dao Tien to let him take Bien somewhere else. He and Bien head back towards the jungle. Quan cries–something he has not done since his mother’s death 20 years prior.
Pages 73-106 Analysis
Building on allusions from the second section, Huong uses this section to shine a light on the discrepancy between the realities of war and the party-line patriotism that governments use to convince the general populace to die for a cause. Shortly after Quan meets Dao Tien, they get into an argument about whether any profession is as “useful” as being a soldier. Dao Tien has clearly been indoctrinated by party-line ideology, to the point where he cannot believe anything else. He tells Quan, “Young people today really lack judgment […] They’re out for their own interests, never the glory of the Party” (75). Quan thinks to himself, “Old bastard, he’s going to drone on with the old sermon” (75). Quan’s frustration stems from a deep-seated, if unconscious, feeling that his generation were lied to by men like Dao Tien, who can’t see the truth of the situation.
Huong illustrates the theme of self-propelled destruction in the novel through the story of Quan’s military unit accidentally attacking fellow soldiers by mistake. In talking to Dao Tien, Quan realizes that Dao Tien’s brother was a member of a unit that was largely destroyed by friendly fire from Quan’s unit. Quan’s unit was so driven to fight for glory that they did not realize until far too late that they were killing fellow soldiers. Ironically, the person who realized the mistake is Phien, who is killed by Luy by accident in the first section of the novel. At this point in the novel, while the enemy has rarely been mentioned and never seen, many have been killed by friendly fire or simply by the hazards of war or the jungle. Party idealism and natural causes have done more to damage Vietnam and its people than any outside influences.
Bien’s transformation provides an additional example of how the war intrinsically destroys people. Quan observes through flashback the differences between Bien as a boy and the mentally-unwell version of Bien he meets in the novel’s narrative present. As Bien washes, Quan observes: “His body was covered with scars. How many times had he rolled in that barbed wire? His ribs stuck out from his emaciated torso. This wasn’t the young man I had known” (102). Bien has literally and figuratively been stripped of everything that defined him before the war and has been ravaged by his experiences.
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