Fantastic Pairing for a Literature Class--Tim O'Brien and Bao Ninh

Tim O'Brien, a well-known American writer of the Vietnam War details the hard decisions and horrors faced by soldiers. His collection of short stories called The Things They Carried could easily be used in a classroom paired with Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of the War, which is centered on the narrator's own platoon from North Vietnam.

Bao Ninh fought in the Vietnam War himself as did Tim O'Brien. Bao Ninh began in Hanoi in 1969 and went through the fall of Saigon in 1975. Both of these authors draw extensively on their own personal experiences to create beautiful AND disturbing literature.

Both authors choose not to glorify war or its cause in any way. In the same token, they refuse to vilify their enemies. Both narrators question why this war was ever fought and humanize their enemies for the readers. From both of them we understand that no matter what side you were on or for or against, real people died.

In O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the narrator kills a man and wonders whether this person wrote poetry or what kind of person he was. While his buddies are very happy about his kill, our narrator cannot reconcile himself to the fact that the actually took the life of a fellow human being.

In Ninh's The Sorrow of War, Ninh tells a story that is similar. Phan accidentally stabs a dying enemy and after listening to him call and call for help, the protagonist Phan goes in search of a medical kit. But when he finds the kit, he can't find the crater where he left the man. It is raining, and all the holes are getting filled with water. So, in both of these pieces, the authors discover that the opposing soldiers are victims too.

The way that O'Brien and Ninh are similar as well is that writing is a release for both of these men. They both see the simple act of writing as a kind of catharsis that can eventually heal them or at least attempt to clarify their experiences. O'Brien goes so far as to write "stories can save us" in one of the last stories of his collection. In other words, the telling and retelling of these stories both heal and allow for deeper understanding of the past. I understand this to mean that these two authors are writing for themselves as much as they are writing for us.

The difference is that Ninh's narrator doesn't have as much success as O'Brien's. His protagonist feels "his pen takes him closer at first and then more distant from what he wishes to say." In neither author is there closure, but maybe they get one step closer to some kind of closure.

These two authors would be a great pairing in American Literature or any other kind of literature course due to their similarity in theme. O'Brien and Ninh both tend to humanize their enemy in war and use their writing as at least a particularly cathartic experience. Students could experience the Vietnam War through the eyes of two different people from opposing sides.