The Jungle Of Screaming Souls Analysis

The horrors of the war are reflected throughout the novel, but Ninh uses the landscape of the Central Highlands to reflect on Kien, and how the war affects him. There are sharp and horrific descriptions of the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where effective language conveys images of Kien’s suffering and the overwhelming power that it has on Kien’s mental state. Ninh also uses strong images and juxtaposition to reflect on his image of his hometown, and how that image has changed after the war, where the reader interprets people’s horrible suffering in poverty. The relationship between the violence and the natural landscape also conveys the traumatic environment that soldiers had to cope with, to the reader, using grim language to describe both the landscape and the violence.
The descriptions of The Jungle of Screaming Souls not only reflects on the horrors of the war, which has a strong presence on the novel, but it is also parallel to the journey that both the war and Kien goes through. The specific descriptions of the setting is personified, using words to imply suffering as well. Bao Ninh describes the transcendence of the war over the natural habitat. The stream is personified and Bao Ninh describes it as moaning, which indicates the suffering that it goes through after the battles of the war: ‘The stream moans, a desperate complaint mixing with distant faint jungle sounds, like an echo from another world’ (Page 2). This idea is continued where the stream is making ‘a