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 34-73Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 34-73 Summary
In the second section, Quan starts his leave by exiting the jungle and contemplating the difference in how he feels. He avoids a bombardment and arrives at a shelter maintained by a woman named Vieng. She cooks dinner for the two of them and they make small talk over the meal. While Quan is asleep, Vieng attempts to wake him up and seduce him, hoping to quell her loneliness. Quan refuses her, citing impotence.
Afterwards, Quan wrestles internally with his refusal, as he is not actually impotent and merely uninterested in having sex with Vieng. He then leaves the shelter while she is still asleep. While lost in the forest, Quan happens upon the skeleton of a dead soldier and has a lengthy internal conversation with himself about the soldier, how he died, and the meaning of his death. Quan leaves the dead soldier and continues to wander before eventually collapsing of hunger, thirst, and fatigue.
A little girl rescues Quan by bringing him to a shelter and forcing him to eat and drink until his strength starts to return. The next day, her grandfather returns to help care for Quan. Quan realizes that there are others in the shelter with him. As the others are leaving, Quan intends to go with them, but is stopped by the old man, who insists that Quan is not well enough yet, regardless of the urgency of his errand. Ultimately, Quan leaves the shelter and arrives at Zone K with the help of another young man who is delivering mail.
Pages 34-73 Analysis
In the second section, Huong introduces the theme of being lost that pervades the rest of the novel. Quan sets off on the first of many micro-journeys in which he moves from physical place to physical place but encounters the same desperation and misplaced patriotism in each of the places he visits. At the beginning of his quest to find Bien, Quan feels positive: “I was free from the suffocating atmosphere of the forest, its stifling shadows of dense vegetation, its poisonous fragrances that sent shivers up my spine” (35). Escaping the jungle and his responsibilities as a leader are freeing for Quan. However, reality sets in again very quickly, and Quan becomes literally lost in the jungle soon after starting his journey.
Quan’s experience with Vieng, during which she attempts to have sex with him, reflects his experience with the war as a whole. Faced with a situation where he theoretically should be enthusiastic, he can’t bring himself to feel anything. He can’t ignore the underlying disgust he feels in order to act with the energy expected of him. Quan draws a comparison between his experience with the war and with Vieng, saying:
I needed to meet her to finally see myself clearly. I had been defeated from the beginning. The eighteen-year-old boy who had thrown himself into army life was still just a boy, wandering, lost out there, somewhere just beyond the horizon (49).
While “the cause” is referenced some in the first section of the novel, the second section contains the first more direct allusion to Quan’s feelings about Communism and Marx’s teachings. Quan dreams of libraries “piled up with all the ideologies, manifestos, and polemics by all the balding, bearded geniuses, with all their resolutions adhered to all the herds of dreamy, militant sheep” (62). In his dreams, Quan can feel what he cannot express out loud–deep misgivings about the reasons he and his comrades are fighting in the first place.
