The Sorrow of War - The Importance of Setting

Often the setting in a text will carry symbolic significance, supporting as well the writer's key themes. Discuss these concepts in the light of The Sorrow of War.

The setting plays a huge role in The Sorrow of War as it is the setting, the places that hold the most importance to Kien. Every time he sets foot on a battle field or somewhere touched by war, memories come flooding back to him, dragging him back to the time when he was fighting. Everything thing Kien sees he can relate back to war, it is as even though the war is over, the war inside his head is not. When watching "a pantomime...many years later...an artist bent over, writhing his body in agonised desperation, by magical association Kien recalled the moments when Thinh had similarly crouched in sobbing despair"(pg 31)

Though the war has ended years ago, his memories are still so vivid, so graphic that it feels like yesterday and he as started to loose concept of time; "how many long years have passed? Ten or eleven? Twelve? No. Thirteen?...Or was it longer?", Kien often thinks to himself, not completely sure what the answer is.

The Sorrow Of War - Setting from the Book

"Kien knows the area well. It was here, at the end of the dry season of 1969, that his Battalion 27 was surrounded and almost totally wiped out....That was the dry season when the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely, and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them, spreading like the fires of hell....The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships....No jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass. No plants." page 2.

The setting of an area in the Jungle of Screaming souls really lives up to the name of the jungle. This was the area where Kiens battalion almost got completely wiped out which must have been a horrendous experience and for Kien to go back later with the MIA team to collect remains of bodies and to know what occurred there must have been difficult.

Hearing that the grass clearing is diamond shaped, I thought that it might have given some hope as diamonds are associated with happiness and prettiness, however then describing that the clearing was "piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships", contradicts the shape of the clearing and suggests that even the few pretty places in the jungle are covered with death and sorrow. The fact that "No jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass. No plants." is almost like that section of jungle has been so tainted by death, so destroyed by the war that nothing new, nothing good can ever grow there again. This, I believe is a metaphor to how Kien feels. He was a survivor of the war, walked away from the war physically fine but was so scared mentally and so effected that surviving the war may have not been the best outcome as though he may still be alive and well on the outside, is he really on the inside?

Even the weather was fierce and unforgiving, suggesting that the war was affecting the weather as much as the land and the people.

The Sorrow of War - Extract from an article commented on.

""Even me, I'm nearly forty. I was seventeen at the start of the war in 1965, twenty-seven at the fall of Saigon in 1975. So, how many long years have passed? Ten or eleven? Twelve? No. Thirteen? Another year with the MIA team. Or was it longer? And more time wandering as a veteran. Closer to fourteen years lost because of the war." - page 48

The atrocity of the war also made it hard for him to readjust to peacetime. Almost everything reminded him about an event during the war. His life was now full of flashback, vivid blood, dead bodies, screaming souls, sounding explosions, and much more. Although the war was over, Kien was living it still in his mind and soul."

http://www.helium.com/items/784901-book-reviews-the-sorrow-of-war-by-baoh-nihn

This illustrates just how difficult it was for Kien and all the other surviving soldiers to come back after the war and try and live a normal life again, and not just the soldiers, the Vietnamese people too. After the war, there was great focus on the Americans and how the American soldiers were coping once the war had ended, that no attention or thought was paid to the Vietnamese despite them loosing more men.

The struggling to remember how many years it has has been since the war shows that while in war, time has no significance and days, months and years just merge into one. And, though the war was a major and dramatic part of his life and when the war finally stopped, it was a definite change, Kien struggles to remember how long along it was because war has taken away his sense of time.

The Sorrow of War - The non-lineal time scheme.

An aspect that interested me is the non-lineal time scheme present in the book.

It is as Kien is just writing as it comes to him without any clear order or reason. The story frequently has analepsis', dating back from his childhood to wartimes.

The style of the book is like a metaphor to the war, as nothing is planned and you can never guess what comes next, for me, this shows just how much the war has impacted and changed his life - consciously and unconsciously.

At first, it is hard to comprehend and I found that I was often second guessing my initial thoughts, not too sure about what tense he is talking in. But I found as the story progresses and the unreadable pattern continues, I became accustomed to the flashbacks and the non-lineal time scheme, I think this too is a symbol of war as after enough time passes you grow accustomed to the death and gory surprises and stop noticing the ever-changing circumstances.