English Commentary

English Commentary

The following is a commentary on paragraph in P.G 211 a 212 in the

Sorrow of War..

The paragraph from page 211 to 212 has a very important significance

to the story as a whole. It has a lot of metaphors and similes that

add to the sorrowful mood of the story. In the beginning, the

paragraph is very poetic, juxtaposing past images of life to future

and present images of death and destruction. In specific it juxtaposes

the "eternal" beauty of his girlfriend Phuong to the tragic finality

of war. The paragraph is written in the simple past tense, the perfect

past tense which means the past before the past and the hypothetical

"would" in order to emphasize Kien's deep longings to relive the past.

It also shows us how Kien lost his spirit of fighting, and gave up

hope. This is spiritual loss, and it is what most soldiers were

experiencing. There is basically no more hope, no more life, just

death. Overall, the paragraph reflects images of the sorrows of war.

The sorrows and effects of war are clearly shown when the narrator

reverses traditional symbols. The first very evident example of

reversing traditional symbols is the narrator's use of the concept of

"miracle" and "dream" not to talk about a future goal but about the

past. Thus returning to the past and finding it "unchanged" becomes a

"miracle" and a "dream". We usually dream of the future and hope for

a miracle that would "change" our lives. However the miracle that

Kien awaits is to find that the past still exists "untouched" and

"untainted". Of course that miracle is impossible and consequently

the paragraph has a deep nostalgic sadness. Like Kien, we can feel

the painful irony of the impossibility of this miracle to happen.

Other images function in the same way to show Kien's despair and loss

of hope. He saw "a river stretching before him. He saw himself

floating towards his death". Here the narrator compares the river to a

path that ends life. However, we usually associate rivers with freedom

and ongoing life. The narrator also says "fate waited to take him from

the terrible present to the happy days of the past". The narrator is

showing us how much he longs to relive the past and how he dreads the

present, and views his future as a horrible period of time.

In the beginning of the paragraph, the narrator creates a beautiful

world untouched by war through many poetic images. The narrator says

"she would have been untainted by war". This shows us how war has