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.
Pages 106-153Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 106-153 Summary
Quan and Bien discuss what Bien will do. Quan wants him to return to their village; Bien refuses on the grounds that he would be shamed. As a favor, Quan offers to send him to another unit for an undisclosed special mission. They eat, and Quan sees Bien “as he used to be” (109). Afterwards, Quan returns to the village alone.
On his journey home, Quan remembers meeting his father for the first time, and the subsequent turmoil in his home as his parents fought. He recalls his own relationship with his father, which is not particularly loving or strong. Upon returning home, Quan sees that his father lives in squalor, as Quan’s deceased mother did all of the work on the house. Quan also visits Luong’s family and learns from them that his younger brother, Quang, has been killed.
The following day, Bien’s mother visits Quan. Quan continues learning updates about people he used to know in the village, particularly young women he and his friends knew and had feelings for in the past. While Quan has dinner with Bien’s family, a secretary of the Party drops by and asks Quan to speak at a Party meeting. Bien’s father observes of the current Party:
Now the ones who hold the reins are all ignoramuses who never even learned the most basic morals. They study their Marxism-Leninism, and then come and pillage our vegetable gardens and rice fields with Marx’s blessing (133).
Quan eventually tells Bien’s father the truth about Bien’s situation, though he keeps that information from the rest of Bien’s family. Quan also learns from Bien’s father that his former sweetheart, Hoa, now lives as an outcast after becoming pregnant and being shamed. Quan visits Hoa and finds, as with so many other parts of his life, that things have changed so much between them in 10 years that they hardly recognize each other. After a banquet to celebrate his departure from the village the following day, Quan visits Hoa one last time.
Pages 106-153 Analysis
While mothers and their significance are mentioned earlier in Novel Without a Name, this section puts greater focus on them in conjunction with Quan’s return home. Quan reminisces about his own mother and her importance as an influence in his life. He observes, “She had loved us, given us strength and faith in life. Her love had seemed inexhaustible. The more she gave, the more she had” (113). As part of emphasizing mothers, Quan observes how different fathers are: “In a mother’s heart, there is no glory worth the life of a child, no ideal higher than the desire to give happiness. But this village was ruled by the authority of the father” (125). Quan blames his father’s influence for his younger brother’s death.
Quan’s comparison of his mother and father ties into the larger themes of “the people,” as described and conceptualized by the Party, versus people in reality. For Quan, fathers represent the blind desire for glory that drives a country to war, and drives families to send their children to fight. Motherhood, for Quan, is a nurturing, warm concept–one that represents family, love, and home.
At the end of his time at the village, Quan experiences a microcosm of his emotional journey from the beginning of the war until the present. He experiences a sudden rush of violent feelings, which he describes as “the fever of combat, the hatred, the irrepressible desire to kill” (152). He wants to fire “on everything that reminded [him] of this life, of everything [he] had lost, of all the invisible forces that had ransacked and trampled [his] existence” (152). His ardor no longer focuses on an enemy; instead, he wishes to destroy anything and everything, continuing Huong’s theme of war leading to internal destruction.
