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.
Themes
Innocence and Emotion as Casualties of War
As is often the case with novels of war, one of the primary themes of Novel Without a Name is how war strips young soldiers of their innocence and ability to feel. Quan and his fellow soldiers enlist as soon as they are able, marching off to war with an enthusiasm that matches their youth. Years in the jungle wear them down. Quan is described by the end of the novel as graying at the temples, despite being only 29 years old. He meets other characters who have either aged prematurely–such as the guard at Zone K, who has had dysentery for years–or who are completely ravaged by the war, like Bien.
A significant side effect of being forced through conflict into maturity at a young age is that most of the soldiers have no particularly strong reaction to violence and death. They frequently come across skeletons and corpses–some of which show signs of mutilation–and treat the occurrence as just a regular part of life. When a tiger kills a soldier in Bien’s Special Unit, his platoon-mates simple deal with the problem and carry on with their work. Quan finds sleeping in a coffin strangely apt for the situation he finds himself in. Quan is also unusual in that he does have some trepidation that other soldiers do not, including revulsion at the idea of eating orangutans, as he feels that they too closely resemble humans. The other soldiers’ lack of disgust and continued pressure on Quan to give up his objections demonstrates the sensitivity beaten out of them by war.
Huong further highlights the young soldiers’ place between childishness and maturity in depicting many of the soldiers, including Quan, thinking about their mothers in times of desperation or missing them when upset. While these soldiers may be old enough to hold weapons, to march, and to kill the enemy, they are basically boys. For many of them, their primary concern when they realize they are going to die is for someone to tell their mothers what has happened to them, and to bring their belongings back home. When Quan comes across skeletons–or sometimes living soldiers, like the deserter in later sections–he wonders who the boy’s mother was, and in some cases feels a desire to try to fulfill the soldiers’ wish of taking his belongings to his mother.
War affects Quan not only as a soldier, but also through his father’s career as a soldier. When Quan is a young boy, his father is away fighting the French, and he thinks of his absent father as a mythical figure. Whoever his father may have been, he is not the same man when he returns; rather, “[h]e was nothing but a brute, a cruel, hateful presence” (113). Quan’s father’s actions drive Quan’s mother to death, essentially from grief. He also convinces Quang, Quan’s younger brother, to join the army instead of following the path he wants; doing so gets Quang killed. As time goes on, Quan’s father simply wastes away, having “neither the strength nor motivation to do much” (117).
Marxism’s False Promise and the “True” Vietnam
Huong’s own politics come through very clearly in Novel Without a Name. Every Communist Party official Quan encounters in the story is corrupt, blind to reality, or both. Quan inhabits a conflicted mental space where he simultaneously questions Party ideology when having it blindly repeated to him by higher ranking officers and Party officials but becomes offended when a subordinate has the same doubts. While Quan is lost in the forest, he dreams of “polemics by all the balding bearded geniuses, with all their resolutions adhered to by all the herds of dreamy, military sheep” (62). While Quan’s unconscious mind feeds him these thoughts, it’s not until the very end of the novel that he acknowledges, “We’re all in the same herd of sheep” (288).
Shortly after meeting Dao Tien in Zone K, Quan realizes that Dao Tien is “going to drone on with the old sermon” (75). Out loud, Quan says, “My generation, we joined the army as soon as we reached the age to do our patriotic duty. The blood in our veins is Vietnamese. As long as a foreign invader remains on our soil we’ll fight” (75). In voicing this, Quan is repeating the ideology that has been forced on him since he was young. Whether or not he believes it, he at least tells others that he does, and a small part of him must believe it at this point for his ultimate realization, at the end of the novel, to hold worth. Huong sets up a dichotomy between a version of Vietnam peddled by Marxist agents–a false one–and the real Vietnam, with its people and traditions being stomped out by Marxism’s effects on the country.
Quan acknowledges that his father’s ambitions of glory for the Communist Party help destroy his family. Quan’s father, like the Party itself, cares only about glory and not about individual people. Communism is meant to bring equality to everyone; instead, in Huong’s view, it only equalizes everyone under a certain rank, normalizing them so that they are all exploited to the same degree. Furthermore, Quan eventually realizes that the “puppet soldier” enemies that they are fighting are fighting for the exact same reasons–glory and country–it’s just that the glory they’re fighting for is driven by something other than Marxism. At heart, they are all Vietnamese, with the same culture and history, but Marxism has helped tear the country and its people apart in the name of bringing them together.
Quan’s train ride to Thanh Hoa gives him time to listen in on a conversation between party officials, during which the smaller official, who represents corruption, successfully counters all of the arguments of the taller one, who still believes in party ideology. At the end of the novel, Quan’s conversation with Kha brings to the forefront the same idea that Quan overhears in the train: Marxism as it is being practiced does not actually take the common people into account and is merely a tool for controlling them. Overwhelmed by his own disillusionment and numbness, Quan’s mind turns to the “true” Vietnam–a vision of its landscape, culture, and people.
