In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, “The Sympathizer” the reader
is constantly reminded of the narrator’s role as the “other”. From his
childhood in Vietnam and early rise to maturity to his barely live-able
conditions in his American apartment, many of the narrator’s internal struggles
to fit in stem from his status as a bastard child. The narrator himself states
it frankly in the beginning of the novel, “My weakness for sympathizing with
others has much to do with my status as a bastard…” (36). Like his racial
identity, the narrator repeatedly blames his birth status as cause for his ostracism-
and not without reason.
These internal battles influence
every aspect of his life, from his political alliances to his sexual relations.
When the narrator encounters the General’s daughter he is instantly drawn to
her similar conglomeration of Vietnamese and American identity. Nguyen writes,
“Some men preferred those innocent schoolgirls in their white ao dai, but not
me. They belonged to some pastoral, pure vision of our culture from which I was
excluded, as distant to me as the snowcapped peaks of my father’s homeland. No,
I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved” (124).
However external prejudices also
shape the narrator’s activity and characterization as well. Throughout the
novel, the narrator not only fights his internal self-guilt but encounters
microagressions from other characters as well, constantly reminding him of his birth.
Even from his childhood, he was bombarded with this message of being different,
like when the comedian, as the narrator calls him, tells him that his birth is
unnatural (207). For example, the Department Chair of the library reminds the
narrator, “Mixing native flora with a foreign plant oftentimes has tragic
consequences, as your own experiences may have taught you” (63).
In my opinion, I think Nguyen
intentionally created the narrator to be included in the margins in every way
possible. His racial, birth, and political identity are all pushed into the
middle ground and muddled by circumstances. In this way, not only is he able to
sympathize with all sides, the reader is able to also sympathize with the narrator
himself. Nguyen is able to create a character that is both moral and immoral, a
communist and a capitalist, one that is both Vietnamese and American. As a
result, he is able to create a novel that gives a new approach to the
traditional Vietnam War narrative. With a character that doesn’t belong in any
one box, Nguyen is able to explore every aspect of the war and how we remember
it, making the reader question how much of our beliefs are true.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Nguyen wanted his narrator to be on the margins in every way possible. I think his mixed identity helped make Nguyen’s argument that the Vietnam war and the people involved can’t be characterized simply as one type. The war and its participants are complex and have many sides. Nguyen makes an effort to show this by discussing how terrible it is to classify people into types. He discusses how western media has turned fleeing southern Vietnamese into “boat people” that might be thought of as a “newly discovered tribe of the Amazon” (151). This comparison to an Amazonian tribe makes the type casting seem so ridiculous that it conveys the falsity of it. The idea that typing people is impossible is seen during the scene where the narrator is talking of Dr. Heads book. He says that Dr. Head was speaking of him “in the sense that he was dealing in types” (251). He then goes on to quote several different “types” of Vietnam fighters from the book and discuss how he sees himself in all of them. This continues to support the idea that people are complex and can’t be put in one bucket and assumed to be the same as everyone else. Nguyen also builds this argument by finishing the book with the narrator referring himself as “we” and “me and myself” (376). This is the ultimate literal illustration that there are multiple sides to any person or event in history.
You are correct to point out that the narrator's status of a bastard is significant and intentional in the novel. Our narrator never truly fits in during any point in his life, so it is not hard to see how he ends up becoming a double agent and changes sides frequently throughout his life. This is what ultimately allows him to assimilate so well into American culture and make his role in the book possible and believable.
ReplyDeleteI think readers can learn a lot from this book and try to copy how the narrator is able to analyze situations from all sides. When we detach ourselves from our ego and what we feel like our identity is, sometimes that is when we see situations for what they truly are without ourselves obscuring our own view.