The Sorrow of War Essay

For this review I choose a book called “The Sorrow of War”, which was written by Bao Ninh. Ninh fought for the North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and recounts his time as soldier. He served in the 27th Youth Brigrade in 1969 when he was 17. Ninh was one of only 10 soldiers in the brigade that survived the war. From just before the war started to the end, and all of his experiences throughout the war. Instead of using his own name to tell about his experiences he used a character named Kien. During the time it was

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

According to The National Institutes of Health, 20 percent of veterans from the Iraq war suffer from PTSD. The main character deals with the struggles associated with PTSD, which causes him hardship in social and emotional relationships. The struggles not only put pressure on Krebs but also his mother. The author wants to show people the major lasting effects that war can have on people. Krebs, the main character is dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and this shows by the struggles he is having with transitioning from the war setting to the civilian world,being emotionally detached and when he comes home from the war he isolates himself.

In the short story, “On the Rainy River” his book The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien shows the internal conflict he has with himself about entering the Vietnam War. He gets drafted into a war that he hates, and he battles himself on whether or not he wants to fight. He feels like a coward for deciding to fight, but then has to deal with putting his family through the pain and stress of possibly not making it through the war. While O’Brien struggles with his moral convictions against the war, he determines to fight in the Vietnam War to protect his family and defend their honor.

Throughout war literature, fiction or nonfiction, almost every character comes face to face with death. There is no easy way around it, death will always happen. In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, death is woven within various stories narrated by the main character, O’Brien himself. Of all the death that O’Brien is surrounded by, the one that may appear to some as “just another kill”, surprisingly leaves the biggest impact. It can be seen as ironic, but after O’Brien had thrown the grenade that killed this enemy soldier, he finally received the reality check of the Vietnam War. Not only was there a reality check, but O’Brien’s storytelling about this soldier gave a whole new meaning to death itself.

Kien’s post war experiences can be compared to any other veterans post war experiences with PTSD. It can be assumed that war veterans do not consider war a place of happiness, but rather a terrible place. The Sorrow of War says that war is a place of sorrow, depression, and horror, but also a place of change and maturity. This is conveyed through Kien’s flashbacks and

In the book, The Unwanted, it’s a book that tells the true story of a person who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America. There are lots of scenes that affect me deeply, and those scenes can even change my values. For example, Lam cruelly left two pregnant women behind for himself. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine that a person who leaves two pregnant women behind in order to survive, even if he is the father of those two fetuses. And I feel the especially significant scene is the conversation between Kien and the American soldier.

The Dead Young Vietnamese Soldier: O’Brien’s killing of the young man takes a profound toll on him in Vietnam. At first, the reader believes that the young man is no more than a symbol of O’Brien’s guilt. However, when O’Brien imagines the young man’s life and how it so closely parallels his own, the reader understands that the he represents what O’Brien’s eventual fate could be. The idea of death is an ever-present fear amongst those in Vietnam, and has plagued O’Brien since he received his draft card. When he kills the young man, O’Brien disregards what is acceptable

   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

“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut…” (118, TTTC). O’Brien illustrates the corpse of the young man very graphically, mentioning the “slight tear at the lobe of the ear”, the loss of “the upper lip and gum and teeth”, the disjointed head, and the wounded, bloody neck, along with the cheek peeled back in ragged stripes, looking almost animated (122, TTTC). The writer repeatedly recites the explicit descriptions in order to express the soldier’s own obsession with the chilling experience that leaves him nothing but mute. While Kiowa, his companion, urges him to talk about the traumatic event, Tim O’Brien instead, formulates his own story concerning the lifeless, Vietnamese man, the man whom he knew nothing of- the belief that the man wasn’t a fighter judging from the “bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers”, with a sunken chest and the “wrist of a child” (118, TTTC). He suspects that the man wasn’t into politics; rather he liked books and mathematics, with the hopes of becoming a teacher or scholar someday, however, had no choice but to partake in the war due to the underlying fear of bringing disgrace upon himself and his family. O’Brien more or less, inflicts his own life story and internal

The authors purpose was to explain what his brother’s thoughts about living and eventually dying during Vietnam. The reader captures the struggles and comradery ship the soldiers experienced while in war. The audience really starts to grasp who is really fighting our wars. It’s not the older people who has seen the world.

In the novel, The Sorrow of War we find that Kien is telling the story from his point of view as a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam war. The Author, Bao Ninh, tells his experiences and memories of the war through the Character known as Kien. Through these memories, we can find some ideal differences between North and South Vietnam.

The style of writing used by Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War is also highly significant because almost every occurrence involving Kien was chaotic and highly unorganized. Throughout the novel, Ninh includes several flashbacks in which Kien almost entirely involuntarily revisited a memory of his, generated from his personal experiences during the Vietnam War. By including these flashbacks, Ninh inevitably merges the past and present. This further illustrates the fact that the past experiences of trauma still linger with their victims in the present. An example of this is found in the beginning of the novel, when Kien was trying to sleep but couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see the faces of dead soldiers. Because Kien is constantly

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel depicts the horrors that are a result of war. Kien is the main character whose life is used to depict these horrors; a soldier who’s lost all his comrades, lost his love, and lost his path. Kien’s life is made to be extremely harsh and extremely undesirable by the readers. The novel starts off with Kien gathering the remains of his fellow fallen soldiers, this gathering seems to be the trigger for

The Vietnam War was one of the greatest controversial wars that was fought. Not only was North and South Vietnam involved, but also the United States and others. A common myth is that the Vietnam War was less intense than World War II. In the Vietnam War, those wounded or killed was more than 300% higher. With South Vietnam’s lost in this war, the country today, is a communist country. The Sorrow of War is a story of a North Vietnamese soldier, Kien, during and after the war. The story illustrates how Kien goes through his life living with PTSD and having flashbacks of the war and he becomes an author. The Sorrow of the War stayed mostly true to what happened in the Vietnam War. Kien went through diseases, talked about the battles of the Vietnam War, and the effects of the war.