The world of characters in Vietnamese novels during the renovation period

painting from a different perspective

If in the past, war was often viewed from the perspective of the community, then The Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh) was the first work to perceive war from a personal perspective. For soldiers participating in the war, war corrupts them and confession and repentance are essential needs of people with conscience. Kien ( The Sorrow of War ) has undertaken a journey of "finding lost time" in mind and reality. War is recreated through memories, through dreams, haunting, becoming a part of Kien's existence. Kien confesses to the sins he has committed (his corruption during the war). Kien repents for having gone to war. The journey to find his lost comrades, to find the past in dreams is a form of repentance for Kien. The past haunts him forever, the flow of memories makes Kien feel more and more the devastation and destruction of war. Therefore, The Sorrow of War is also an anti-war novel. “Recognizing war from the most pessimistic and cruel angles: through the experience of ten years of massacre, what have people learned about compassion? about humanity? about humanity? Those luxuries are mostly absent from the market of blood and bones. When facing death, there is only one valuable and significant truth: “As long as you don’t die in the dry season.” Bao Ninh found a bewildering and fierce definition of war: “War is a world without a home, a miserable wandering and a great drifting, a world without men, without women, a world of sadness, indifference, the most terrible extinction of the human race.” [54, p. 32] Among the reformist writers, Ta Duy Anh has created quite a few self-confessed characters. The novel Lao Kho has shown the fate of the main character “Mr. Kho’s life is a testament to the ups and downs of human life”. The beginning of the work is the old man preparing to go to court. In those moments, he looked back at his life. With so many ups and downs, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, he became a victim of history and also a victim of himself. When he had power, he became drunk with power, lost the good in himself, and became indifferent to those weaker than him. But fate

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The world has changed, and he himself has to taste the bitterness of life. It is not by chance that Ta Bong, the sworn enemy of old Kho in the past, after 30 years of wandering, returned to see him and said: “ Mr. Kho, I don’t know what you feel at your age now. For me, it is loneliness, fear… It’s been thirty years, Mr. Kho, why remember… Everyone has a time when they were foolish and made mistakes. In the end, what have you gained ?” [2, p. 384]

Ta Duy Anh's next successful and resounding novel, Looking for Characters , also talks about human repentance. The characters Chu Quy, Dr. N, writer Ban, and Thao Mien all go through a process of self-examination. Chu Quy is always tormented by the crime of raping a girl and then has to suffer the terrible punishment of lifelong impotence. Thao Mien repents to return to her innocent nature. Dr. N is always haunted by the death of his "younger brother". N lives in pain, torn between two sides of himself, one side is a perfect doctor in front of the public and his wife, the other side is a son who forgets his father, his origin, his homeland and indirectly kills his younger brother. Dr. N falls into a mental crisis throughout his life. N tries to free himself by volunteering to go to the battlefield to seek death, but the death that N is aiming for is not realized and is selfish. N continued to live a lie. Suicide was a process of complete repentance and a way for Dr. N to return to the purity of his soul.

Ta Duy Anh's characters " are always on the boundary between good and evil. Every character is always placed in a state of choice and struggle, with society, with the environment, with enemies, with relatives, with themselves. They are never allowed to choose once and then done, before this event is over, there is another situation, their lives are struggling and the writer also has to strain his mind to think, making the reader generally... tired " [27]. The tormented character, living with guilt and repenting through moments of repentance is the prominent idea of the novel Repentant Angel . It can be said that the characters here are all repentant characters. The hired assassin, the killer of his children when they were not yet human, the merciful mother... and even the angel is a " repentant angel ".

Also on the journey to good, prisoners are the ones who want to repent and confess more than anyone else. Nguyen Dinh Tu's novels ( A Death Row Inmate's File , Draft , Version ) all have the same motif of misguided people wanting to repent and confess. Dan ( A Death Row Inmate's File ), after a period of living with Nhung, has realized his own life. His act of repentance is not abandoning Nhung when she was bitten by a snake. Before escaping, Dan still fired a gun to signal the police to save Nhung. Later in prison, Dan was also reassured when he knew Nhung had a good life. At this time, Dan seemed to have returned to his previous self - an honest student who wanted to destroy bad and evil.

The existence of repentant and confessional characters in the novels of the renovation period, on the one hand, reflects the reality of life: the collapse of values, on the other hand, it refers to the belief and hope in goodness and good human values. Through the lens of an individual, people see the whole society. Those confessions are often warmly welcomed by readers as long as the confessing character is a person who knows how to analyze himself, has an objective attitude towards himself as well as towards the surroundings. People are at risk of being corrupted or have been corrupted but have not lost themselves. The repentant confession does not belittle them, on the contrary, it affirms the good aspiration to live honestly, the process of human perfection never ends.

3.4 Lonely character

World literature has mentioned the type of lonely characters in the works of famous novelists such as: M. Sholokhop, G.Market, H. Murakami, JMCoetzee. The characters built carry within them a very strong mark of the times. New life, new people, many values are formed but many things also disappear. Lonely people appear more and more in life: lost, lacking harmony, indifferent... And those people enter novels as an effort of writers in exploring the depth of human psychology and personality.

Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Bich Thu in the article Signs of innovation in prose after 1975 through the system of thematic motifs identified: The appearance of the character of the girl

Loneliness is one of the signs of innovation in literature. “ Loneliness is a problem of each individual, but it is not necessarily a small private problem. It can be said that each individual's private life is combined into a problem of the community, of society. People are lonely when they lack empathy, lack a common voice. The state of loneliness is often expressed in the emptiness of the soul ” [66, p. 60]. Comparative literature researcher Nguyen Van Dan also pointed out that the appearance of lonely people is a mark of the absurd literature of the West penetrating into Vietnam [15].

This affirms that the lonely character is an absorption of Western literature in Vietnam, and at the same time is also the result of the innovation of the artistic concept of human beings of writers in general, and of novelists in particular, during this period.

Before novelists portrayed lonely people, Nguyen Huy Thiep's short stories had mentioned this person. What is the reason for the appearance of lonely people? Nguyen Huy Thiep sensitively recognized a seemingly contradictory but very reasonable thing: Lonely people in the sea of people. The character "I" in The General Retires clearly shows this. Living in a family with many members, with all generations, he still feels lonely. Because the people around him are passionate about chasing money, status, and fame. They only remember their own desires and goals. How can people not feel lonely when they are surrounded by people like that? The cause of loneliness lies in the contradiction of concepts. The general values spiritual values while his children value material things. He can never understand or get along with his daughter-in-law who brings fetuses home to raise German Shepherd dogs. This person is lost in the face of the times, lost and lonely in his own family, among his relatives. And death is the inevitable solution to escape loneliness.

In the transition of times, there are always lonely people. They are people who are not “in tune with the times”. They live with a different scale of values compared to contemporary society; think and pursue things that most people consider abnormal. For these characters, loneliness is a constant feeling. In life,

They try to find someone who can sympathize and share with them, but it seems helpless and hopeless.

Once again we mention the characters in Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War . Kien's father and Kien are both lonely people in life. The painter (Kien's father) burned all his works before he died. Perhaps the artist was so lonely that he lost faith, thinking that no one could understand his art. Throughout his life after the war, Kien lived with the haunting past, lonely, lost in reality. In the afternoons wandering the streets, thinking endlessly about the past, about his novel, Kien became a stranger in the eyes of many people. " There's the writer from my ward " - a man on the corner said to another man. Kien passed by a man sitting on the sidewalk selling poisonous snakes. The snakes were long and stretched out, not even bothering to wiggle, looking bored with life, lying flat. On the other side of the street, children gathered around a blind old man who stopped to sell colorful balloons. Several beggars lay on stone benches by the lake. Yellow leaves were falling. The city was crowded and sad.” That was the loneliness of a soldier who was always tormented between the past and the present. That was the loneliness of an artist struggling to create.

Nguyen Ngoc Tu is a short story writer who writes quite sharply about lonely characters. Nguyen Ngoc Tu has a deep concept of that when building the motif of a lonely artist. People will find it difficult to understand, sympathize and explain why a mother like Dao Hong "because of her passion for singing (...) left her child with someone else, to the point where he didn't even look at her anymore", like Dieu ( Being a mother is not easy ) who left her newborn child to play the role she had been waiting for a long time. The artist puts her dreaminess between cold but failed calculations. An artist character of Nguyen Ngoc Tu often says: "What do you guys know?". " But reading Nguyen Ngoc Tu, we feel the loneliness very clearly without seeing the pessimism and despair. Her characters are self-aware of loneliness. They accept it because they find in that pain a reason to live. And, from that pain, they rise up and become human. Loneliness in Nguyen Ngoc Tu's opinion is the driving force of Beauty and Goodness" [46, p.138].

In the novels of the renovation period, there are lonely people with many different expressions. The lifestyle of the subsidy period and the market economy period is also one of the environments that makes people feel lonely and lost because they cannot find the meaning of life.

Angels are a kind of nihilism in the subsidy period (young people who do not know how to do anything but party, eat and drink, and live without purpose). Hoang - the main character in God's Opportunity (Nguyen Viet Ha) - an intellectual, denies life with alcohol. Hoang also does not know how to do anything but hang out in bars, swallowing liters of strong alcohol and then throwing it all up. He loves Western wines (a high-class product of the market economy), but is almost unable to digest any kind of alcohol. Hoang has a resemblance to the lonely characters, who cannot integrate into the community, of absurd literature. Like Camus' Meursault, Hoang also has an indifferent look towards life mixed with a bit of disdain, especially indifferent towards money.

In another form, there are lonely people when they are surrounded by ignorance, ugliness, and evil. Intellectuals are built by writers as images of noble people. A series of characters by Ma Van Khang fell into loneliness such as Khiem, Thinh ( Upstream ); Tu, Kha, Uncle Thong ( Wedding without a marriage certificate )... As people who are passionate about their work, they become victims, always oppressed and hindered by petty, jealous, scheming elements who find every way to oppress others to advance. They are outcasts in an environment full of ignorant, evil people. The relationship between intellectuals and evil people is always a marriage without a marriage certificate.

Loneliness is also a painful obsession on every page of writer Ta Duy Anh. The writer himself is a lonely ego. “ I like loneliness. I like being alone. I never participate in anything collective. I don’t like parties because every time I participate, I feel that the contact does not leave anything good. It makes my body empty, makes me panic, makes me pale ” [28]. Loneliness in the past, loneliness in the present. Every time the writer holds a pen, he

living in the state of an orphan. A reader character in his work exclaimed: “… It is very possible that the master himself is a terrible loneliness and he is inclined to tragic inspirations ”. Ta Duy Anh admires Dostoievxki and Nam Cao because they dare and have enough talent to compose in solitude, they do not need the attention of their contemporaries and they all choose suffering instead of happiness. Writers cannot choose the crowd, follow their tastes and compromise with their need to please.

The type of lonely character is associated with the writer's perception of human fate . Humans are small, full of anxiety and exile. Sometimes the character appears as a helpless being in an absolutely silent world like a vast desert. In the winter afternoons of human life, " old Kho feels terribly lonely", "can he bear to be the last one to lie down after his elders have returned to the ground one by one ". In the end, life is like a punishment, he " wanders, lost, lonely in the midst of his own kind ". Portraying the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of being out of time and out of place, Ta Duy Anh's work wants to raise the question of self-questioning of modern people. Why do people feel lonely in the social community they live in? Why can't they find sympathy and sharing? And here is an answer: loneliness is a predestined fate . Loneliness as a punishment, loneliness is something without a reason, simply they are human, lonely because they are lost, out of place and can also be lonely because I am me, I decide, choose myself, not the chaotic crowd. As a young overseas writer, Thuan brings loneliness to most of his novel characters. " The sense of absurdity, breakdown, and distrust of perception has dominated the tone of Thuan's novels. Thuan's novels can be classified into the trend of emotionless prose (a prose trend that appeared in the US since the 80s of the 20th century), describing a cruel, empty, inhuman reality in Western postmodern society " [7]. Thuan's lonely characters bring us a new concept. Not only are there macro-level factors that impact and create loneliness, there are also very small things that can eliminate people from the community, turning them into lonely people. The character Lien

( Paris 11/8 ) Lien was aware of her loneliness among her friends very early. " In primary school, Lien had almost no close friends ". The same in secondary school. High school failed following the inertia of previous years. The years that should have been the most carefree and innocent were the years that marked Lien's loneliness among her friends. The reason for this loneliness was that Lien was aware of her difference from those around her: difference in perception (the girls believed in the fairy tale of Tam Cam, believed in Cinderella's magic chestnut, but Lien did not believe, even thought it was stupid); difference in appearance (no one was as ugly as Lien with her fierce eyes and face always full of acne). Five years of university, nothing had changed. At this time, ugliness was like a fate that clung to Lien, making her strange to her own beauty, strange to the opposite sex. “ Lien’s puberty was not marked by any boy’s face”, “there was no smell of Thuy Ta rice cake ice cream but only the fishy smell of dermatology clinics ”. The day Lien received her graduation certificate, there was “not a single flower - not a single card”. Lien became a solid block of loneliness, unable to integrate with the surrounding environment. The more lonely she was, the more Lien withdrew into her shell. The “fierce” gaze became the only self-defense weapon for Lien to fight against scrutiny and sarcasm, that weapon deepened the distance between Lien and her friends, school, and the surrounding living environment.

Trinh ( Van Vy ) also has a similar life. Trinh does not belong to the established gender norms. She belongs to the third gender. This difference pushes her into a state of complete loneliness. “Lost” for Trinh is understood in the true sense: lost from the human world, belonging to another gender that is not accepted by society, not yet identified. Raising this issue, the reader is forced to reconsider the issue of homosexuality. Those people of the third world still need sympathy. “ Exposing the bitter reality of the lost life, Thuan does not criticize, does not condemn, does not call for humanitarian aid. However, through the lost fates, there are glimpses of a few escapes, as Thuan explains it ” [30]

The lonely character is a relatively new type of character in contemporary novels. In the way of expressing loneliness we see the development of literature.

The world of characters in Vietnamese novels during the renovation period - 10

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