The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Rain represents sorrow, and the jungle represents war. The first line of the novel mentions a river. The second mentions rain. The MIA team, with Kien, is back in the jungle, but they can’t recover the bodies because of the rain—they are awaiting an end to the rain, which, in this case, is an end to the war, and their sorrowful memories of it. The narrative thread of the MIA team is never finished; instead, Kien simply switches to a different memory, so in the context of the narrative thread, he never leaves the jungle.

Every time Kien speaks of the jungle, he is talking of war. He recalls the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the track where Hoa was raped and killed, and his escape with Cu, Big Thinh, and Tam. He remembers the three girls murdered by South Vietnamese soldiers, all deaths that occurred in the jungle. Most of the war took place in the jungle, so Kien associates the jungle with war, with screaming souls. Many of the soldiers believe the jungle is haunted—they hear screams, they see visions—but what they are really seeing is their own memories, their own fears of the war, and since it rains all the time in the jungle, they can’t escape their sorrows while they are still in the jungle, still in the war.