Summary of End of The Sorrow of War PDF

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Summary

Lit 237 - Professor Huse
Summary on the end of The Sorrow of War.
Contains:
-Essential sections regarding specific scenes and characters
- Important to follow up discussion board assignments/quizzes...

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Reading Notes on the End of The Sorrow of War --Some comments on Phuoung’s name. It’s a common Vietnamese girls’ name and it means “Phoenix,” the mythological bird reborn out of its own ashes. By giving his female protagonist this name, Ninh may be making a literary allusion: in Graham Greene’s canonical novel about Vietnam, The Ugly American (1958), the mysterious Phuoung represents the country itself. Is Ninh’s Phuoung also allegorical in that she symbolizes indestructible elements of the nation? Is she also like O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in any way? --Note the section on pages 122-128 about Kien’s family. This focus on individual psychology violates the Communist principles of literary realism concentrating only on class conflict. Ninh suggests that Kien’s problems with women stem from his mother’s abandonment of the family. This section is also iconoclastic since it points out the protagonist’s lack of filial piety, the respect for one’s parents demanded in Confucianism. Vietnamese Communism integrated elements of Confucianism into its philosophy, including a reverence for its leader, Ho Chi Minh. --On page 131, observe the “Three Don’ts” of Vietnamese Communism. Any interest in love or sex would be deemed bourgeois: all human passions should be concentrated on class struggle and liberation from the imperialist oppressors, whether French or American. Obviously, this brand of Marxism has considerable elements of prudery or Puritanism. --Starting on page 170. The driver is already sexually harassing Phuoung, providing both with a warning of the dangers of bringing a woman to the front. Why are they so heedless of these threats? This question brings up a parallel one: to what extent is Phuoung a three-dimensional character? We do learn that she was from a bourgeois family and that her mother encouraged her piano playing when she was young. But what explains her risk-taking and her promiscuity? --Page 171 refers to the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Vietnam after the war with the French. The more famous DMZ is, of course, between North and South Korea. --Ninh is clearly familiar with the classics of Western literature. There’s the possible allusion to The Ugly American, perhaps the most famous Western novel about the Vietnam War, and his description of the light in Phuoung’s window recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rendering of the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock in The Great Gatsby (173). --The scene on pages 173-177 is an atmospheric account of The Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964 that led to American military involvement in Vietnam. It’s a complicated and fraught incident involving espionage and deception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident --The novel puts the lie to the Communist vision of a classless society. Truckers and soldiers repeatedly taunt Kien for being bourgeois; in addition, Ninh points out the working-class accents and poor grammar of other South Vietnamese, like the soldiers at Saigon’s airport. He

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also stresses regional differences: Hoa, for example, explains that she lost her way in the jungle because she’s from the coast. --Note that the only Americans appearing in this novel are African American. Why do you think Ninh made this literary choice? Extra credit: I couldn’t find the quotation from the first part of the novel where someone refers to the fear of African-American troops. Please email me if you find it. The dog handler is the one who initiates the gang-rape of Hoa: sexual violence is a form of retribution here. --Is it me—or does Kien somehow disappear when Phuoung is being raped or in danger of sexual violence? What’s going on here? --Note that Kien and Phuoung only avoid being on the train bombed by the Americans out of sheer luck: they’re late to the station. This insistence on luck as the sole source of redemption recalls Komunyaaka’s “Thanks.” --The conclusion of the novel draws from the found manuscript tradition, a literary convention when the author or another character claims to have stumbled upon the document. A prime example is Robinson Crusoe. This device creates further distance between Ninh and his protagonist since it depicts the “I” as assembling the pages Kien leaves in his room before he abandons it.

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