a narrator of two faces

Learning as much as I did about aspects of the Vietnam War I wasn't aware of or hadn't thought to examine before was one of the most valuable parts of this reading experience. Reading it with the support of a classroom environment to talk through some of the viscerally violent scenes and more political context of the text was also extremely helpful, as I think I would've felt lost in all of the historical and cultural impacts otherwise. Generally, the intrigue of our unnamed narrator, a man who's able to empathize on a level that makes his profession as a double agent more complex, kept my interest the entire way through. This was mainly due to the fact that I couldn't always tell if I sympathized with the sympathizer, if I felt pity for the series of events he lives through or general disgust for the way he views and interacts with women (this quality in the narrator is still an uncomfortable one for me). On the other hand, the narrator's relationship with his childhood friends Bon and Man ends up being significant in the narrator's ability to understand how, despite all three of them believing in different political ideologies, America's influence on the war in Vietnam has caused all of them terrible suffering. I was also really interested in this narrator's consistent guilt over the various things he's done as a part of his spy work. We get the occasional glimpse into white interrogation rooms before an extremely violent scene involving a female communist agent at the end reveals just how much trauma this man is holding inside of himself. Witnessing the narrator kill two people and then be essentially haunted by these two people is also a curious craft move to show inner turmoil and guilt. I ended up diving into a conversation with a classmate for the sake of research on the concept of names and namelessness. She framed it like this: "Who's doing the naming and what are their names?" A fascinating question to ask of a book where most of the men are only given names that signify their careers or rank in the military (Commandant, Captain, "crapulent major," etc.), and the two prominent women are given actual names and referenced as such (Ms. Mori/Sophia and Lana). What this is meant to either say or not say about how the narrator views other characters in light of their national identity as Vietnamese-Americans is only complicated by our narrator who never receives a name, but by the end of the book has begun to see himself dually as "a man with two faces." I haven't even mentioned the movie the narrator ends up taking a part in, chiefly in working with and advocating for the Vietnamese refugees acting as extras on the set, tasked with representing their entire people group on the silver screen dictated by an American director. But I could go on and on, and won't for the sake of my own time and sanity. Be wary of the aforementioned violent scenes in multiple parts of this book, but step into it as a whole with an open mind and willingness to engage with a narrator that feels hard to fully grasp in the best possible way.


One of my favorite quotes from The Sympathizer:

"What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?"

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