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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
School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
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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.
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