Novel Without a Name

“The more we were tortured by the consciousness of our appalling indifference, the more searing the memory of our mothers’ tears. We had renounced everything for glory.” 

Quan says this in assessment of how things have changed from when he and his friends first enlisted. As young men going off to war, Quan and his fellow soldiers thought only of future glory, disregarding how their mothers felt about their leaving to fight. Years later, after seeing and participating in countless horrible things, the same soldiers think more of their mothers. That pain their mothers felt is juxtaposed with the numbness they feel after experiencing war for so long.

“I had never known happiness. So this was it, just this moment? I had never known freedom. Maybe this was it. Just this instant.” 

When Quan first leaves his unit in search of Bien, he emerges from the jungle and feels instantly freer. For a few moments he is able to enjoy the beauty of nature–warmth, sunshine, and grass–as opposed to the oppressive heat, humidity, and closeness of the jungle that he has been in for so long. Quan is able to connect with his country’s natural beauty, even if only for a few moments. 

“I had needed to meet her to finally see myself clearly. I had been defeated from the beginning. The eighteen-year-old boy who had thrown himself into army life was still just a boy, wandering, lost out there, somewhere just beyond the horizon. I had never really committed myself to war.” 

After refusing sex from Vieng, Quan realizes that his refusal has less to do with her being unattractive to him and more that she reminds him too much of war and death. She is a product of the war, having given herself to it in a way that Quan has not. Quan’s doubts about the war and his continued sensitivities make him an outlier, and not fully invested.

“I scanned the tortured lines in the dead man’s diary. Here we were, the skeleton and I. Two single young men. In our hearts, we both worshipped the same female image, the only woman we had ever known: Mother. We had remained children.” 

This is another instance of mothers playing an important role, and in particular Quan’s observation about remaining a child ties into the novel’s theme of loss of innocence. Quan equates himself with the dead soldier, noticing the similarities between them. The dead soldier likely wasted away of fatigue and hunger, as Quan himself nearly does on the leg of his journey that he discovers the skeleton.

“Everything is over. Finished. There is no one left. Absolute equality: nature’s final gift.” 

In one of Quan’s early nightmares, he imagines a tidal wave destroying everything and everyone. While returning to a more natural state would be closer in line with a true Vietnam, doing so through violence means it will only happen in death. Moreover, nature’s ability to cause absolute equality is ironic, in that this equality is achieved through death. 

“Once, by coincidence, at Camp 88, I had picked up off the ground an old issue of Nhan Dan, the Communist Party daily. The issue was celebrating the glorious victories on the B3 front during the Tet offensive…We had been there. I had buried with my own hands countless numbers of my companions, had dragged away from the line of fire little Hoang’s corpse…” 

One of the key themes throughout the novel is the discrepancy between Communism’s promise and reality. Quan explains that he stopped reading official literature because of this particular incident in which the Party claimed that a battle was a great victory, but the reality was that while they may have won, the North Vietnamese lost many soldiers in the process. Party line only celebrates glory, not the people who are giving their lives for that supposed glory.

“In a mother’s heart, there is no glory worth the life of a child, no ideal higher than the desire to give happiness. But this village was ruled by the authority of the father.” 

Mothers hold an exalted place in Quan’s mind and throughout the novel in general. Most soldiers yearn for their mothers, and mothers serve as a symbol of love, home, and what Vietnam once was and could be again. Fathers – and other male authority figures – are less likely to have their children’s best interests at heart, instead encouraging or sometimes forcing their children into situations that end in madness or death. 

“And all this time there was the me that had lived, and somewhere else a me that stood and watched, dazed, as life ebbed away in torment.”

War has a tendency to create fractured thinking as a side effect of trauma. Quan’s description of himself as being split into two people speaks to that larger theme within war literature. He sees himself as a living being and as a disassociated spirit, watching himself waste away and being unable to do anything about it. 

“We never forget anything, never lose anything, never exchange anything, never undo what has been. There is no way back to the source, to the place where the pure, clear water once gushed forth. The river had cut across the countryside, the towns, dragging refuse and mud in its wake.” 

Huong uses descriptions of nature as a symbol of the true Vietnam repeatedly. Here, Quan expresses that he does not see a way to return to the past, before the country became tainted by war. 

“That ideal, well, the kids need it. And it’s all we need to turn them into monks, soldiers, or cops.” 

This passage is part of the same conversation as the quote above. Here, the party official explains how ideology can be used to mobilize people to do whatever the party wants. He cites as an example how people were coerced into fighting colonialist armies first, then each other. 

“Revolution, like love, blooms and then withers. But revolution rots much faster than love, ‘comrade.’ The less it’s true, the more we need to believe it. That’s the art of governing.” 

As part of the central conversation in the novel about Communism and its true effects on people, a party official explains to his friend that revolution is a fleeting concept. He insists that encouraging people to hold onto ideals, however wrong, is how people at the top–like him–can effectively control the masses and therefore the country.  

“We demolished the temples and emptied the pagodas so we could hang up portraits of Marx, enthrone a new divinity for the masses.”

During the conversation on the train to Thanh Hoa, the smaller party official explains to his comrade how Marxism isn’t atheism because Marxism itself is a religion. People worship him as they once might have worshipped a god. The official also highlights how part of imposing the new culture of Marxism means tearing down traditional Vietnamese culture.

“This time I’m willing to forget this ever happened. But if you continue to behave so inconsiderately, I’ll have you sent to you know where.”

After telling his companion that Marx was an adulterer who didn’t buy into his own ideas, the smaller party official on the train is addressed by a soldier who claims offense with the official for insulting Marx. By way of response, the official screams at the soldier, waving his credentials around as a show of power until the soldier is intimidated into going away. Though the soldier is correct, the Party official uses his elite status to manipulate the soldier by threatening him with re-education camp. 

“It seemed as if I had always slept in this kind of bed.”

Quan has this thought when he must sleep in a coffin while visiting Bien and the special unit that Bien is part of. Having been at war for so long, and having seen so many horrible things, death seems only natural for Quan. He knows that he will one day (perhaps soon) end up in a coffin as a more permanent residence.

“No one can bathe in two different streams at the same time. Me, my friends, we had lived this war for too long, steeped ourselves for too long in the beauty of all its moments of fire and blood. Would it still be possible, one day, for us to go back, to rediscover our roots, the beauty of creation, the rapture of a peaceful life?” 

Belief in the “true” Vietnam of the past–its people and culture—is a major theme of the novel. Here, as Quan drifts into his thoughts shortly after contemplating death and remembering his mother giving birth to his brother, he gives this central theme explicit place in his mind. While he may yearn for the past and who his country once was, he doubts that it is possible to return to that past. 

“I thought of the eighth, the ninth, the tenth…Who would ever know the exact number of innocents in this war?” 

At several points in the novel, Quan or people he meets describe stumbling across corpses or skeletons while going about their regular lives during the war. A driver that Quan meets tells him about finding seven skeletons picked cleaned by termites, and how the area they were found is now called “Valley of the Seven Innocents.” 

“He had chosen another destiny, one that had begun with the betrayal of his roots.” 

Quan’s childhood friend Luong gives himself entirely to the party and its goals. He advances in his career much faster than Quan, rising through the ranks, and does not seem to ever question what he is doing or why. Quan realizes that he and Luong cannot be friends any longer because of the path that Luong has chosen.

“Who was his mother? The thought tortured me.” 

Many of the soldiers, including Quan, often think of their mothers, and particularly remember or long for them when close to death. After Quan finds a deserter on the road, the man says he misses his mother. Quan also misses his mother; feeling some kinship with the deserter due to their shared feelings, Quan obsessively thinks about the deserter’s mother, just as he dreams about his own.

“I often thought of my brother, saw his little red feet again, fighting like a fish caught in a net…The sadness, the weariness would overcome me. And then I would see myself wriggling like a fish in a net, crushed by the weight of my past…” 

Referencing the most pervasive symbol of the novel, Quan compares himself to his brother, on the day his brother was born. Quan’s comparison is a contradiction: where his brother was a newborn, struggling for life for the first time, Quan feels trapped by life and struggles without hope of improvement. 

“On both sides you died believing that you had attained your ideal. We had forgotten everything: mother Au Co, father Lac Long Quan, the shared womb from which we had sprung.” 

In Vietnamese creation legend, Au Co and Lac Long Quan united to create 100 children from whom the tribes of early Vietnam were born. By citing this legend, Quan realizes the two sides of Vietnam fighting against each other are the same people, coming from the same origins. With the “foreign invaders” gone, the two sides are only destroying what was once one country, and are fighting for the same reasons but different ideologies. 

“Woe to he who inherits nothing. But even more wretched is he who leaves nothing to his descendants.” 

In his dreams, Quan imagines his ancestor chastising him and his entire generation for their behavior. Quan feels angry with his ancestor for criticizing him, claiming that the ancestor left him nothing. According to his ancestor, past generations left “triumphal arches” for Quan’s generation, and Quan’s generation is leaving nothing for those who come after, suggesting that whatever war and Communism build, it will be empty and not worth passing on.

“Ah, but do the people really exist?” 

A central promise of communism is that it gives power to the masses and that everyone will be equal. During his conversation with Quan, towards the end of the novel, Kha denies that “the people” exist as anything other than a lie told in order to control the masses. In his eyes, “the people” are those like his struggling parents, who are not benefiting from communism and are, in fact, being placed under more pressure than prior to communism’s inception in Vietnam.

“And yet Kha had made the long march without ever dreaming of glory, without even hoping for a share of the spoils. In his numbed brain, beyond the rainbow of glory, he knew that there would come a day when he would go back to the mud of the rice paddies, to life as it had always been, from time immemorial.” 

Quan finally acknowledges outwardly the truth he has known deep down for the entire novel during his conversation with Kha about the state of the country. His realization that Kha never bought into the ideology of the party represents a major shift in Quan’s thinking, a shift that means he, like Kha, will never be able to see things any other way after learning the truth. Kha simply does his duty knowing that one day he will die and return to nature.