Novel Without a Name

Of crucial importance is the different attitudes between Nguyen and Quang has towards the Vietnam War. Nguyen represents the traditional view that the Vietnam War was a failure on the part of the Americans, a mistake and pointless war that ruined the lives of many. What is surprising is Quang’s view. With an immediate and loud retort to Nguyen’s negative feelings towards the Vietnam war, Seol’s portrayal of Quang immediately grabs the audience’s attention. Quang is grateful for the Vietnam war, and “thankful for the American soldiers that gave up their lives so [he] could live.” Actor Seol aptly captures the spirit and sentiments of an actual Vietnamese refugee, and in doing so provides a refreshing and different perspective about the Vietnam War. Faced with these differing perspectives, the audience must come to realize that America is not a monolith, but instead composed of people from many different backgrounds with varying experiences, attitudes, thoughts, and

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

“Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell. For twenty years I have constantly accompanied you on the road to honor and glory. In these latter times, as in the days of our prosperity, you have invariably been models of courage and fidelity. With men such as you our cause could not be lost; but the war would have been interminable; it would have been civil war, and that would have entailed deeper misfortunes on France.

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

During the war, a significant amount of things happen to different groups of families in their homeland. There are soldiers that are fighting for the protection of their families and there are many families that are doing anything in their power to stay safe through the chaos. Yet a number of the individuals involved in the conflict have a tendency to try and escape the madness. In spite of the madness, some children have the advantage to escape yet they are equally impacted with long term trauma by the war as those who did not have the opportunity to depart.

One thing that the book misses, however, is the same suffering, perhaps even worse, that was imposed upon the Vietnamese people. This is typical of novels from this time; they all exhibit a bold ethnocentricism (Lomperis 5).

Mary Anne is first presented as a “seventeen-year-old doll in her goddamn culottes, perky and fresh-faced”, which brings about an image of the innocence and an American Dream-esque teenage girl (92). By presenting her as such, O’Brien illustrates the naiveté of someone who is being introduced to war, yet has no experience. She shows up on the first day with no understanding and therefore no knowledge of the severity of war. However, within a page and a half, Mary Anne changes into a girl who could “clip an artery and pump up a plastic sprint…[and who] cut her hair short” (93-94). Like a soldier, Mary Anne did not complain nor shy away from the trauma; she embraced it and fully immersed herself in it. Though she was trying to prove that she was tough and could handle Vietnam, she slowly became more and more invested in the gore and horror of war. After disappearing for days at a time, abandoning her boyfriend, and associating herself with the mysterious “Greenies”, Mary Anne was finally seen “wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues” (110). Although she retained her classic all-American outer appearance, her personality became polar opposite. This is a reality that many soldiers experience, where they turn into shells of their former selves, left with the abyss that war created. While the character of

This chapter covers the transition of Mary Anne Bell, of how she changed from being a normal, sweet teenage girl to being one of the Green Berets, filled with enthusiasm for the war and intrigued with the culture of Vietnam. This message is about how the innocence of women is consumed by the war and how once they begin to learn more about it, they are hopelessly entranced by it, far from returning to their usual selves. Rat talks about how, “Anne made you think about those girls back home, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try and tell them about it, they’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip.”(O’Brien 108), and this shows that women won’t understand what Vietnam really is like, they have to experience it themselves. Women also won’t understand the grueling mental pain that soldiers experience in the war.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

"I have tried to describe accurately what the dominant event in the life of my generation, the Vietnam War, was like for the men who fought it" (Caputo, p. xxi). In Philip Caputo's own words, he describes the book he tried to write as an accurate portrayal of the events of the Vietnam War, not as he wished it had happened and not in protest of what happened. To this end, Caputo was successful. His book, A Rumor of War, provides a poignant and evocative glance into the lives of real men who fought in a war which no one who was not there could ever truly understand. In going about this, he touches on a variety of recurring themes in his book: the romanticizing of war vs. actual war, the personal aspects of war vs. impersonal aspects of war,

War can be a stressful time for people and families everywhere. At the current time in the book, world war II is happening. Gene and his friends learn about what is going on across the world. All the lives losses and all the tragedies. Its a difficult time to be a child. In times like that, the kids have to grow up and act serious. Gene and his friends mature quickly and want to help out in the war. Kids are maturing quickly in order to help the country.

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.

Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War tells a very realistic and explicit story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier and writer, during the Vietnam War. Kien manages to survive, usually by luck, through battles and