War and Love in Ninh's The Sorrow of War

... Novelists often structure a novel around a series of carefully selected incidents. Explain the importance of two such incidents to the theme or themes of the novel. In Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, Ninh helps the reader to understand war as being all-conquering and consuming by comparing it to love, using a series of examples and incidents within the novel. In addition to this, after making the comparison to love, Ninh demonstrates war's capacity to taint love and in this way indicates its lasting and sorrowful effect. By comparing and referring to the two consistently within the text, Ninh is able to show their importance and the ways in which they affect one another as one of the major themes of the novel. Ninh's perception of love within the text flits between the naively sincere and the despairingly hopeful: love before and after the war are almost two different

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