English Commentary :: English Literature

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