We have had enough of ill feelings for one generation. Yet, the novel concludes with the village divided and Ollye leaving to seek a new life. Unlike the Korean War, a great deal has been written about the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1954 to 1975. The fiction and poetry of Americans and Vietnamese who witnessed the war employ a common approach to style and form. In fiction, a quickly shifting narrative, lack of superstructure, and absence of transitions disorient and frustrate the reader.
Vietnamese novels dealing with the war demonstrate similar fragmentation.
In Bao Ninh s The Sorrow of War , an unidentified speaker tells the story of Kien, one of only ten survivors of the Lost Battalion of the North Vietnamese Army. Troops in the fragmented companies tried to regroup, only to be blown out of their shelters again as they went mad, becoming disoriented, and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno .The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized. A montage of images, stories nested within each other, and reflections on writing mingle to disorient the reader and create an atmosphere of chaos and destruction. The novel alternates between the first and the third person, undermining the reader s sense of an authoritative consciousness controlling the book.