English Commentary

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Mohamed Rizk

20-12-2004

English Commentary

The following is a commentary on paragraph in P.G 211 → 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.

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        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 ...

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