School of Distance Education

The Sympathizer 
by Viet Thanh Nguyen 
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, 
Viet Nam. He came to the United States as a refugee in 
1975 with his family. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor 
of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the 
University of Southern California and a recipient of 
fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur 
foundations. His debut novel 
The Sympathizer 
was 
published in 2015,Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in
2016. Nguyen’s recent works include the short 
story collection 
The Refugees 
and the nonfiction 
collection
Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics 
in Asian America
, which he edited.
The sympathizer can be considered as a spy 
novel that explores the dynamics of power. It offers a 
Vietnamese refugee’s perspective on the Vietnam War. 
It follows the life of an unnamed South Vietnamese 
secret policeman, Who is actually a spy working for 
north Vietnamese communists. The Captain gets orders 
from another agent to accompany the General as he, his 
family, and close associates flee to the United States. 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
49 
The novel attempts to craft the captain’s identity in an 
unfamiliar land, as he deals with love, loss and the 
heartbreak of exile.
The Sympathizer 
is a novel in the form of a 
confession to The Commandant in a reeducation camp.
The Captain’s identity is multiply complex, and 
his role as a spy, a man wearing a South Vietnamese 
mask over his communist face, is the least of it. In fact, it 
is the in betweenness into which he was born that makes 
him fit to be a spy. He was born in the North but made to 
flee the Communists with his mother when he was nine, 
settling in the South. Cut off from the possibility of 
respectability and family, he lives mostly as a political 
and professional being, although even in these realms his 
sense of self is contradictory: on the surface he is a 
supporter of the Republican South and an ally of the 
Americans; deep inside, under the mask he wears as a 
spy, he is a communist working for the revolution. He is 
unable to take a hard line against American capitalism, 
so that even though he has devoted his life to the 
revolution, the revolutionaries find him, and his 
confession, suspicious. Nguyen gets much good humor 
from parodying the white, male, “educated” arrogance of 
the Department Chair who tells the Captain who he is as 
“an oriental,” explains to him his identity crisis, and 
treats him like a patient in a cultural experiment. . The 
Chair symbolizes particularly an American way of 
thinking and being, common both in and out of the 
academy, a mentality that surfaces particularly in 
interactions with women and minorities. The mentality 
may express itself as a faith in science, knowledge, and 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
50 
study, but it arises out of a belief in one’s cultural, racial, 
or gendered superiority.
At one level, 
The Sympathizer
is a thrilling spy 
story, a novel about friendship, exile and personal 
compromise, and a study of moral and mental 
degradation under the crushing weight of a totalitarian 
regime. But it is also an unmistakably satirical and 
political indictment of a savage war that ended in 
tragedy. He who owns the representation owns history 
and controls who is human and worthy of sympathy. 
The 
Sympathizer
punctures the seal of American control over 
the story of Vietnam, giving us complex characters who 
love their home and want it back. The novel’s ending 
reflections move our thoughts from the particulars of the 
Captain’s 
identity towards a 
more universal 
understanding of the complexities of identity. And we 
begin to see that simplifying people’s ways of 
identifying and their thoughts and beliefs is a political 
project, and that it is the embrace of complexity that is 
the truly revolutionary act.