The Sorrow of War Essay -- Literary Analysis, Bao Ninh

It can be hard to fully comprehend the do the Vietnam War had on non just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of fight became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war belie the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim OBrien, twain veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and role the loss of hunch as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting. Bao Ninhs novel The Sorrow of War tells a very realistic and explicit story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier and salvager, during the Vietnam War. Kien manages to survive, usually by luck, through battles and situations in which survival seems futile. When Kiens full platoon is killed in battle, he is one of the few to survive. This seems to be a state of grace and a curse as Kien had perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than some(preno minal) other contemporary writer (Ninh, 89). As one can imagine, Kien is haunt daily by gruesome hallucinations and memories from the battlefield. Kien begins to write about his war experiences, which turns into an obsession. He claims it is obligated as his duty to write about the war, and yet seems to write only to rid himself of his devils (Ninh, 49). His motivation is to expose the realities of war and the tear apart conventional images (Ninh, 50). It is not just Kien whose life is destroyed by the war. Kien tells of a driver Vuong who, before the war, drank very little and was kind a timid. Vuong disappears for legion(predicate) months and when he returns his life has collapsed. Ive given up driving, fellas. Now alcohol drives me, Voung states (Ninh, 152). Kien tou... ...hard times together and we reunited multiple times. Cross and Martha, however, were distant apart for the length of the war. Crosss deep contend for Martha stemmed from his obsessive passion to b e with her and to be coped back by her. Cross at last concedes that Martha belongs to another world and would never love him (Obrien, 17).The two novels use love as a strong metaphor for the losses of war. Ninh often explicitly states that both Kien and every other solider would be forever warped repayable to the senseless cruelties witness in the long conflict. Kiens deep love for Phuong is destroyed by the war, as is Lieutenant Crosss love for Martha. This paralleled metaphor speaks for both sides of the war and the suffering endured by all involved. The tragic loss of love and innocence illustrates the destruction the Vietnam War had on both veterans and society.