Essay On The Sorrow Of War

“Contrary to much psychiatric opinion, highly stressful experiences that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) occur surprisingly often” (Bower). Bao Ninh wrote his novel, The Sorrow of War, after his experiences from the Vietnam War. The story is about the main character, Kien, and how he goes through his life carrying his “sorrows of war”, and is broken inside because of it. Applying Trauma Theory to this novel, one can see that Kien received PTSD through his war experiences and therefore becomes addicted to his trauma. Some questions can be raised when asked about Trauma theory such as how do some characters cope with the effects of a traumatic experience, or are any of the characters “addicted” to the source of the trauma? According to a lecture …show more content…
All of his friends were killed in front of him, the love of his life was brutally raped after an air raid, the same girl he loved leaves him and he never sees her again, the list goes on. These experiences took a horrible toll on Kien’s life. After the war, Kien had served on a team that collected dead corpses that were fresh or up to several years old. Kien figured that he had “perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any other contemporary writer. He had seen rows of youthful American soldiers leaning shoulder to shoulder in trenches” and they were all dead because “artillery barrages had blocked the exit, sucking the life from them.” (Ninh 89). Kien also experiences “a rain of arms and legs dropping before him onto the grass by the Sa Thay River”, leaving the place looking like “a domed roof built with corpses” (Ninh 90). Seeing a fraction of any of this would be extremely horrible for any person to see, let alone all of it. Things such as this were the prime example of why Kien received PTSD from the war. Bodies of the enemy, parts of bodies from his own men, all of these kinds of things could drive a man