The opening sentences set the tone for the rest of this novel: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” After the narrator questions whether this ability is a talent, he concludes, “After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.” Proves to be quite true.
The unnamed narrator/Captain is a communist double agent during the Vietnam War. He relocates to America with the South Vietnamese after the Fall of Saigon, secretly reporting back to the Viet Cong. This novel—a thriller intertwined with deep personal reflection—is written in the form of a confession after the narrator is captured.
I’m not one to read historic novels about the Vietnam War, but I was intent on finding out why this breakthrough novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Sympathizer actually spoke to me much more than I had anticipated an espionage novel would. Being a half-Vietnamese, half-French illegitimate child, the narrator grapples with his identity in America; although he speaks English perfectly (having grown up in America), he is still viewed as an outsider, a foreigner. Through the detailed depiction of the filming of a movie about the war (resembling Apocalypse Now), we see the narrator’s frustration at the dehumanization and careless casting of the Vietnamese characters as they are continuously portrayed as racist caricatures, helpless victims inferior to the whites. Nguyen effectively gives a voice to those who have been shut out from the propaganda in not only Hollywood but our society.
In addition, having just read George Orwell’s 1984, I saw the resounding parallels between these two novels. In short, the narrator is captured and sent to a communist reeducation camp, where he is “reformed” —much like Winston in 1984—and admits that he did nothing when a fellow communist agent was being tortured. “Doing nothing” is the message his communist comrades want him to comprehend, and his confession of this eventually sets him free. Under interrogation, the narrator goes mentally insane, and realizes that a revolution for which he fought so hard and sacrificed everything amounted to nothing. Despite this despair, he concludes, “We still consider ourselves revolutionary. . .We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.” Doublethink, no?
art of film 