The opening scene featuring Bill’s pointless murder of a monkey establishes the novel’s tone of existentialist despair and mindless violence. The only reason Bill kills the monkey is that a hunt will give him something to do. Even though Bill realizes the monkey is not game, like a boar or a deer, “without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger” (3, emphasis added). The turn of phrase captures both the thoughtless cruelty of Bill’s action as well as his emotional numbness. Characters in the novel are often described as acting in such a dissociated state, signaling their isolation from their own selves. The violence of Bill’s actions is juxtaposed against his more vulnerable response to the agony of the monkey. As the monkey falls from the tree, Bill “felt his own stomach tear itself in two” (4). Here, the monkey becomes a reflection of Bill’s guilt and fast-fading innocence, parts of his self he does not want to face. The fact that Bill feels guilty over his actions denotes that he is not yet hardened by war; at the same time, his eagerness to forget the monkey shows a lack of will to change himself.

Bill’s experience with the monkey also indicates the effect conflict has on men, introducing the theme of The Harmful Effects of Patriarchal Norms During War. The novel examines how the apparatus of war desensitizes young men to violence, encouraging them to view women, animals, minorities, and anyone apart from their comrades as things, as evinced when Bill describes the monkey as “something to be looked at” (3). The worsening of harmful ideas of masculinity is emphasized through the characters’ perception of women, in particular, non-Western women. For example, when the colonel finishes making love with a local woman, he describes the intimate act in callous terms as “another mission accomplished” (5).

The universe constructed in the first two chapters is nihilistic and absurd. To amplify this depiction, author Denis Johnson intersperses his narrative with bizarre, vivid details, such as the murder of the monkey or Bill knocking over beer into the lap of the unmoving Japanese girl. These absurd images only serve to highlight the odd nature of reality, where wars are fought arbitrarily and extreme violence are the order of the day. For instance, when Hao thinks of the death of his nephew Thu, he describes it as “[i]ncomprehensible, crazy,” this act of a 20-year-old man setting himself on fire. Nevertheless, the incident is based on real-world events, where Buddhist monks and nuns self-immolated as a protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority (the government was seen as disproportionately favorable to Christians). Thus, the novel hints that its absurdist depictions are all too real, that the real world itself is the nightmare.

The novel is narrated with mainly straightforward chronology—except for the flash-forward into 1967 and return to 1963 in Chapter 1—and is presented through the perspective of multiple characters. Significantly, even though the colonel is such a central figure in the novel, he is never given a point-of-view perspective. The effect of this narrative choice is to emphasize the mystique around the colonel, since the colonel’s interior world is never directly revealed. He is viewed through the eyes of others— a legend, a con-man, a shadowy creature, much like his operations in Vietnam. The colonel’s presence always raises more questions than it answers. For instance, it’s never clear why the colonel, who is a retired officer and so technically a civilian, is in the Philippines. Strangely, even though the war must feature many colonels, everyone knows the epithet “the colonel” belongs to Francis alone.

The rotating multiperspective structure of the novel also emphasizes the complexity of the truth. The truth cannot be captured by one person’s narrative, but only built, like a collage, through several stories. The subjectivity of the truth informs the novel’s core tenet of moral relativism and highlights the theme of The Impossibility of Simple Ethical Choices During Armed Conflict. This theme is further developed through the dilemmas faced by Hao. Hao, representing the average Vietnamese citizen, is torn between his affection for his childhood friend, Trung, now a Vietminh, and the pragmatic necessity of working with the Americans. Hao indicates that there are no easy answers here: While the communists seem to be working in favor of Vietnam, their rise will mean “the destruction of [his] family business” (21), taking away Hao’s livelihood. The difficulty of ethical choices extends to Trung, an idealist who left for the north, hoping to usher in a new world order. However, when Trung is sent to recruit boys from near the Vam Co Dong River, he is swamped by a sense of futility because he is aware that he is selling them a failed dream.

The question of religion and faith comes up often in the novel, as highlighted in these first two chapters. Characters often reflect on religions and philosophies, illustrating the theme of The Search for Faith and Meaning in an Arbitrary World. For the colonel, John F. Kennedy symbolizes the meaning he seeks, with Kennedy’s death showing him that the world persecutes beauty and nobility. Trung is guided increasingly by the Confucianist and Buddhist faiths of his childhood, reflecting that “peace was here, peace was now” (34). Rather than pursue a future idyll, Trung believes he should accept the present. The recalibration shows that people must continually wrestle with faith to seek meaning out of a meaningless world.