The Book of Salt: The Book of Loneliness

The Book of Loneliness

At finishing the last sentence of The Book of Salt, my mind was left in the blank, and I could not catch actual themes to textualize in pages without hesitation for a while. This was because of – partly, as a matter of fact, I have not had enough mental space to allow someone (even if he or she is fictional) to enter my mind due to my personal urgency, recently– the difficulty of understanding the text, narrated from the first-person point of view narrator’s non-linear narration, consisted of fluctuations of time-fragments and his stream of consciousness.

I only glanced at my vague understandings of the plot and complex feelings. But simultaneously, I was also able to notice me having sympathetic, empathetic responses to Bihn’s emotional fragments from his sufferings as being a diaspora, colonized, and sexual minority. One of the most crashing sentiments or emotional fragments seeped into my mind was his loneliness caused by emotional, physical, and environmental isolations.

Right, this is to say, from the beginning the end of the story narrated by one narrator, one protagonist, one (voiced) character, one protagonist, and alone; I could see Bihn, who is situated or situates himself, in staying only lonely states, as a symbol of incarnated loneliness.

Loneliness, Isolated from His Past Mother Land

The main reason that I interpret him as the incarnated loneliness is his repetitive statements, “I stand there still” (164, 174, 248, 248, 249). When he states, “I stand there still,” he evokes his remembrances with his father and mother, bound in his homeland, Vietnam. The remembrances, complexly mixed with negative and positive aspects – traumatic responses from his father’s abuse and nostalgic feelings with his mother, bring back him to the past setting where he can never go back. Being isolated unintentionally from the past of loving-and-hatred-place and being psychologically stuck in the middle ocean between the past and present worlds, he seems to easily get this emotion: gloomy, unavoidable loneliness from the perpetual loss of his home. Thus, he reflects himself on his desolation, stating, “I looked up, and I saw you standing next to a mirror reflecting the image of a wiry young man with deeply set, startled eyes. I looked up, and I was seeing myself beside you. I am at sea again, I thought. Waves are coursing through my veins. I am at sea again” (36).

Loneliness, Isolated from Mother Tongue

Like his lost land where becomes physically unreachable and only visible in imagination, his native language is isolated and alienated by him and his surrounding environments. In his present world, his mother tongue, as well as his ethnicity and nationality related to his language (considered as one collective feature of “Indo-Chinese” by western colonizers) becomes also useless, incommunicable, and untruthful. But at the same time, even when he acquires the second language, the language of colonizers, he senses losing of originality and his deprived desire by using the second language that cannot be a barrel to express what exactly he is or to define himself. Consecutively, he states these insuperable difficulties, saying, “The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them” (11), and “The vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them” (13).

Loneliness, Isolated from His identity

From the loss of two essential traits, the homeland and mother language, which compose one’s original identity, he is finally not able to trust the binary himself just as he is being left in the ocean between two worlds, being stuck. This impossibility of the coexistence of dual identities drives him into the severest isolation from even himself. Eventually, he expresses him as “no longer able to trust the sound of my own voice, I carry a small speckle mirror that shows me my face, my hands, and assures me that I am still here” (18).

Likewise, even though he can see himself in the mirror, his identity is still in the eternal transition and migrating progress from somewhere to somewhere, being stuck in the middle of elsewhere.

Therefore, albeit he hears someone’s voice “What keeps you here?” as a reflection of himself and he sees “how that body is so receptive to the list of a full October moon,” sadly, I inevitably expect that he will not and cannot permanently escape from the everlasting loneliness from dual isolations.