56 pages • 1 hour read
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
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Pages 76-108 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 76-108 Summary
Kien remembers coming home to see Sinh, a former soldier who had been paralyzed and then was sent home to die. A year earlier, before the paralysis was complete, Kien visited Sinh, but now Sinh lies on his bed, waiting to die. Kien had been happy to return to Hanoi after the war. He rode on the Trans-Vietnam “Unification” troop train after the fall of Saigon, saying it was one of his happiest memories as a soldier. He met a woman named Hien, whom he slept with in a hammock on the train while the other soldiers laughed.
When he gets home to Hanoi, he sees Phuong in the hallway outside his room, but after a short joyful embrace, Kien sees she is living with another man and they fight bitterly. As winter sets in and he still misses Phuong, one night he believes he sees dead soldiers in the room. He sees the Jungle of Screaming Souls all around him. To fight the fear and pain, he begins to write about the war. He remembers all the soldiers he served with. He writes their deaths, reviving them one by one just to see them fall again on the page, but the next morning he feels a melancholy peace as he walks about Hanoi. As the months pass, the novel seems to form its own structure. Kien finds himself returning to the Jungle of Screaming Souls. He writes of the MIA Remains Gathering Team. All his old friends return, only to die again. He shares stories of ghosts and begins to believe in them. He tells the story of Phan, who, while hiding from bombs in a crater, stabs a man in the stomach, then tries to save him. But Phan can’t find the crater again, and it fills with rainwater, drowning the man. Kien writes of Tung, who was wounded in the head and then went crazy. He tells of strange half-men hiding in the forest. He writes of Victory Day and capturing the airport in the last fighting of the war, and he remembers when his friend, Oanh, was shot and killed by a wounded young girl. He sees the naked body of a girl in the airport and that night gets drunk on stolen brandy. For years, he says, he would tell the story of the naked airport girl, unable to relieve himself of his sadness over seeing her.
Pages 76-108 Analysis
Kien says that the writing is not his own: “The novel seemed to have its own logic, its own flow. It seemed to structure itself, to take its own time, to make its own detours. As for Kien, he was just the writer; the novel seemed to be in charge” (88). Here, Kien seems to be blaming the novel for his return to the war. Hien tells him, as they depart each other after the Victory Train, to let their stories become ashes, but Kien can’t seem to let go. He returns again and again to his memories of the war, always in a circuitous or seemingly random manner, with no chronological structure. This he blames on the writing itself, which means he is blaming the way memory works. He can’t control his memories, so they come to him randomly, out of order. The girl in the airport reminds him of the girl who shot Oanh. Remembering Sinh reminds him of how happy he was to return to Hanoi. That, in turn, reminds him of Hien on the train, who reminds him of Phuong, who reminds him of the girl in the airport. He relieves himself of responsibility by claiming it is the writing that forces all these memories on him, but, like Phan, who could not find his way back to the crater where the wounded man was waiting for Phan to save him, he is drowning in his memories. All he can do is write them down and figuratively relive them, in the hope that he is finding his way through them to some sense of peace.
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