Dastardly Dads: Relationship and Confrontation Between Fathers and Sons in the Sorrow of War and This Earth of Mankind
Fathers not only set examples for their children, they provide guidance and form relationships that persist deep in memory. In Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, Kien confronts his fathers within his own memory, whereas in Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind, Minke must face his father alive and in person. Both The Sorrow of War and This Earth of Mankind, through various tweaking of their respective father-son relationships, demonstrate the ability of the fathers to channel their sons along altered paths and altering their paradigms; this relationship causes one son, Kien, to be mired in the past and the other, Minke, to strive for change.
Ninh proves Kien’s emotions have been in turmoil since birth as “when thinking of his childhood or his father he becomes depressed” (Ninh 57). Kien notes from one experience “his stepfather’s extreme poverty,” while Ninh makes it clear in later stories why “his [birth] father’s eccentricities had made [his mother] leave him” (Ninh 123). Despite dwelling in conditions of rampant poverty, Kien’s stepfather “lived in a style that belied his conditions” while imploring Kien to “taste all manner of life” (Ninh 59); Once prosperous and complacent, the health of Kien’s birth father “declined all of a sudden and he quickly became senile, and quite strange” (Ninh, 124), with Kien struggling to “gradually understand a little of those dying words” (Ninh 128). This disparity in personalities and experiences cannot be ignored concerning their impact on character development. With such a startling contrast of fathers, Kien is doomed to grow up unsure of which example to follow, which habits to set, which life to live. Kien’s broad spectrum of guidance from both fathers is Ninh’s way of establishing a character who is indecisive and compassionate, unable to make fully independent judgments which later causes him to look back, after years of mistakes and naïve meanderings, and lament that “it was all too late now” (Ninh 127).
On the other hand, Minke has but one father who serves the sole purpose of driving him away from seemingly archaic traditions. Throughout his life Minke is forced to parry the incessant whims of his father to be a bupati with exclamations of “I don’t want to be an official. I prefer to be free, as I am now” (Pramoedya 106). When Minke is forced to confront his father after being escorted by the police for ignoring his father’s letters, instead of welcoming Minke, his father claims that “the only grounds for forgiving you are because you’ve passed and gone up a class” (Pramoedya 124). Thus, Pramoedya’s relentless accusations of failure directed from a father figure to a son in which the father claims “you’ve forgotten your parents, your duties as a child” (Pramoedya 125) is guaranteed to drive Minke further from the whims of his father and, by the same token, from tradition. Consequently, Minke’s conflict with his father becomes a microcosm of struggle against tyranny and social injustice: Pramoedya has taken Minke’s disdain for his father conveyed it to the greater theme of struggles against native futility and Dutch imperialism.
Ninh includes no such conflict in Kien’s relationship with his fathers-in fact, Kien’s emotional attachment to his fathers combined with the fact that they are confined to his memory only augments one of Ninh’s major assertions: that the sorrow of love is merely the reflection of the sorrow of war. Although his first father is destitute and melancholy, whenever Kien “went into his father’s studio [his] heart ached and he choked with compassion” (Ninh 124). Similarly, after visiting his second father, the poet, Kien feels “an affinity with his sentiments” (Ninh 59). Since both of Kien’s fathers are forever confined to his memory, his longing for them can only fester and as a result his view of them in his mind, like everything else from the past, becomes a paragon of perfection. Kien’s relationships with his fathers are but one more element that forces him to conclude “he was much happier when looking into the past” (Ninh 195). Throughout The Sorrow of War Ninh reveals how Kien’s struggle with loss and longing transforms him into an emotional wreck, as “his sorrows [prevent] him from relaxing by continually enticing him back into the past” (Ninh 232), to where his fathers are alive and where he can love them freely.
Minke’s father remains very much alive throughout This Earth of Mankind and because of Pramoedya’s emphasis on the emotional detachment and incompatibility of the two, Minke’s journey towards revolution in both mind and body continually progresses. Early in the novel Pramoedya makes it clear that Minke’s father is emotionally distant when Minke remarks his “parents never noted down the time of [his] birth” (Pramoedya 19). By the time Minke is finally forced to meet his father he is emotionally abused and demeaned as his father asks “Do you need to be humiliated in public with this whip?”(Pramoedya 124). Few loving fathers would make such a remark and as Minke is belittled and abused for his father’s gains he “suffered all this like a young maiden” (Pramoedya 132), implying his distinct innocence from such cruel punishments and even an argument for martyrdom. Pramoedya uses the living presence of Minke’s father as a constant stumbling block even when Minke flees to Wonokromo in search of refuge from antiquated cultural paradigms. His father’s memory cannot simply be forgotten as unending trains of letters arrive containing accusations that Minke is “unfit to be near [him]” (Pramoedya 276), which naturally leads to Minke’s attitude that “[he] was ready to leave all [his] family” (Pramoedya 125). Therefore, searching for meaning and knowledge in This Earth of Mankind while fleeing his father’s place of tradition, Pramoedya showcases Minke’s progression from the embrace of his father to infatuating thoughts of freedom and independence, establishing Minke’s father as a catalyst for a desire for autonomy.
While the differences between father and son relationships in This Earth of Mankind and The Sorrow of War are important in understanding character development, one of the novels’ similarities is arguably as imperative. In both novels, the father plays a major role in determining the path of the protagonists, the impact never fully leaving either characters’ consideration. For Kien, this prominent attachment to his fathers establishes a sense of painful longing for the past while Pramoedya uses his father-son relationship to demonstrate the necessity of the right father figure in facilitating revolution in a child. Above all things, it is the eminence of the father that is essential to the success of each novel. Both novels focus on the power of the father in determining how a son will live the rest of his life, which is fundamental in understanding a character’s consciousness.
The status of a father-son relationship can certainly gauge how a protagonist can and will function throughout the course of a novel. Kien’s contrite perspective of reminiscence develops as a result of his deceased fathers who can only influence him in memory, which echoes Ninh’s assertion of the ties between the sorrows of war and love. Meanwhile, Minke’s upstart thirst for independence comes as a consequence of his father’s living tyranny, which further grounds Pramoedya’s argument for self-determination in the face of tradition. Not only is this a way for an author to characterize a protagonist’s development in a way that explains his or her actions, but it applies universally to humanity as well. In a world where the future is not simply on the next page, Ninh and Pramoedya together illustrate how a father influence can result in relationships ranging from loose cannons to brooding wrecks, and consequently stress the responsibility a father has to his son or daughter.
