38 pages • 1 hour read
Thu Huong DuongNovel Without a Name
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 194-229Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 194-229 Summary
After leaving the unit, Quan returns to the front, where he looks for the little girl who helped him on his way to his village. While he is looking for them, the area he is in is bombed, and he hides with a woman and her six children. Quan attempts to refuse food in order for the family to have more, but the woman insists that he must eat to keep up fighting strength. The woman says that she will one day return to her village, once “those American bastards leave” (200).
Quan hitches a ride on a truck, where he and the driver discuss getting lost in the forest and finding skeletons. Vu, the driver, wonders, “After the war, will they come back and look for all the soldiers’ bones?” (205).
When Quan returns to division headquarters, he learns that “during [his] absence [his] friend Luy had gone mad” (206). He also notes that a recent battle was a triumph for the North Vietnamese.
One of Quan’s unit members, Hung, gets into a fight with another unit member and stabs him. Quan learns that Hung and Teu–the man he stabbed–were upset over a trick played with food. He observes of Hung that “he was the perfect illustration of the classic Chinese treatise on military strategy” (215). Further, he recalls a memory of Hung’s particular violence, attacking prisoners and refusing to help carry the dead from his own side. Quan also remembers that Hung executed three wounded, helpless prisoners.
While Quan finishes his letter to the authorities about Hung, he receives a letter from Hoa, over a year and a half after it was originally sent. In the evening, a lynx wanders into the camp. Lynxes are “always a sign of disaster. They appear maybe once every three generations. But when they do, you can be sure that a storm will wipe out a village, that a fire will raze a whole region, or that there will be some deadly epidemic” (228). Quan then cryptically makes an observation about the future: “A month and a half later, the omen was fulfilled” (229).
Pages 194-229 Analysis
Up to this point, the focus of the novel has been primarily on internal forces. In this section, a character now mentions the actual enemy the North Vietnamese are fighting: the Americans. For much of the novel, it would be easy to forget who is on the other side of the war, as they are never mentioned explicitly and every time death and destruction do occur, it’s from friendly fire or took place in the past and is only alluded to. Even when Quan and his unit find mutilated corpses in the first section of the novel, the focus is on the corpses themselves, not on the enemy who committed the atrocity. Death and destruction are natural products of war, regardless of who the enemy is.
Building on the theme of the futility of war, Quan also notes that a great victory for the North Vietnamese has occurred. Two things are noteworthy about his observation. First, the observation is made in passing–a single, short paragraph wedged between Quan’s thinking of his old friend Luong, and that “[h]e had chosen another destiny, one that had begun with the betrayal of his roots” (207) and an incident in which “a noncommissioned officer stepped on a mine” (207). Victory is an afterthought, with no connection to the reality of the situation individual soldiers face.
Furthermore, Quan states that “[w]e had annihilated one enemy regiment and decimated two others. Then we received orders to withdraw behind the lines to rest and gather our strength” (207). By relating the situation in terms of triumph followed by withdrawal, Huong suggests through subtext that perhaps the victory is somewhat hollow, or that reality may not have matched reports of how well the battle went.
Luy’s madness also supports the theme of futility. At the start of the novel, Luy is the first person other than Quan who is introduced. Quan leaves his unit to assist his childhood friend, Bien, who has gone mad, only to return to his unit and find that the friend whom he saw last in his unit has suffered the same fate and been sent to a facility like the one in which Quan found Bien. Essentially, Quan leaves to help someone, only to return and have another person close to him in a nearly identical situation.
